Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation

Lord Palmer: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	Why the renewable transport fuel obligation, as provided in the Energy Act 2004, will not come into force until 2008.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I can confirm that we hope to have an obligation in place by April 2008. Implementing such a mechanism will take time. For example, we will need to establish an administrator for the scheme, draft complex secondary legislation and secure approval from the European Commission on aspects such as single market and state aid compliance. The Government will be consulting on the details of the obligation shortly.

Lord Palmer: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. Regrettable though this delay is, will he try to do his very best to ensure that British farmers get the first bite of this exciting new cherry rather than us having to rely on foreign imports, especially from countries like Brazil, in order to meet these requirements?

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for that question. Of course, we will seek to do that. He will recognise that parts of the world have a long history of producing these fuels and have a very long lead. However, we have anxieties about some parts of the world regarding whether they contribute towards reducing carbon emissions by the strategies which they pursue. So it is very much in our interests to encourage British farmers in these terms and, of course, we shall be sending very clear signals of the targets we expect to be reached, and they can go forward with confidence.

Baroness Shephard of Northwold: My Lords, does the noble Lord accept that the delay on the part of the Government in adopting the obligation and, indeed, in announcing capital allowances—all of that was finally revealed on Monday—has in turn meant delay in the setting up of biofuel plants in Norfolk and Dorset? Does he also accept that the fact that these cannot start operations until much later than they had planned will inevitably mean an increase in imports of biofuels? Does he think that is a good thing?

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, whatever we did, in the early stages we would expect to require some imports. However, the noble Baroness is right—it is important that the signals which are sent out now give encouragement both to investors with regard to the plants and to farmers with regard to the arrangements which they make. We are making absolutely clear the timetable to which we are working. My right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer will make a statement on this issue in the Budget. We intend to crack along.

Lord Ezra: My Lords, bearing in mind that some countries such as the United States and Brazil have already achieved a blend of 20 per cent of bioethanol with petrol, can the noble Lord indicate what would be the progression in the United Kingdom of such blends after 2010 when the objective is 5 per cent?

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, that is some way ahead. We are still consulting on the implications for all aspects of our economy of the target of 5 per cent, which is 20 times larger than the initial target that we are starting off with in the first four years. The noble Lord will recognise that there is a very steep progression up to 2009 and, of course, we intend to make progress. But the noble Lord is asking a great deal of us at this stage to give a clear profile beyond 2009 when so many constituent parts of these arrangements are still to be put in place.

Lord Hogg of Cumbernauld: My Lords, did my noble friend hear "Farming Today" at 5.35 this morning? I am confident that he did and will know that it reported that there is some European restriction on the conversion of tallow to fuel. If that is the case, it is unfortunate. Will he look into that matter?

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I will certainly look into that matter, although I am tempted to ask my noble friend whether I saw him in the Palace at eleven o'clock last night. I do of course assure him that we will look into the issue that he has raised.

Baroness Byford: My Lords, given his answer to my noble friend, does the Minister not accept that the Government's record is a disgrace? The obligation was agreed back in July last year and here we are facing further delays. My noble friend is quite right to encourage people to invest and to give hope to British farmers at a time when the Prime Minister is probably going to do a deal against their interests. The further delay is really regrettable.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I hear what the noble Baroness says, but to listen to her one would think that only one interest was involved—the interest of British farmers. They are important to the development of the policy, but conversion and development of our position on transport and the road industry is a significant issue. We need to consult and we need to get this rather complex strategy right. Everyone recognises that such a scheme is complex. The noble Baroness will also recognise that we have issues with regard to Europe and are raising those concerns.
	I recognise that the noble Baroness has every right to press the issue of British farmers. I sympathise with that point, but it must also be recognised that this is not the kind of policy that can be introduced at the flick of a switch.

Lord Williamson of Horton: My Lords, will the Minister bear in mind that after we have finally brought this system into effect, it will be important to give assurances about its continuation for a reasonably long period? Many people apart from the Government have to be involved in planning for the scheme. If we do not have an assurance about a reasonable time period, we could run into further difficulties.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, it is exactly those considerations which make the Government determined to ensure that when the scheme is established there is certainty and clarity about its operation and long-term continuance. Nothing would be worse for all those concerned, not least British farmers, if there was a suggestion that this policy would be pursued only in the short term. When I replied to the noble Lord, Lord Ezra, in terms more vague than he would have liked, about the long-term percentages and targets that we would aim at, I did not intend to imply, in any way, shape or form, that we will not be looking towards a policy that goes a long way beyond 2009–10.

NHS: Staff Facilities

Baroness Masham of Ilton: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What plans they have to ensure that there are sufficient changing, laundry and showering facilities for staff in National Health Service hospitals.

Lord Warner: My Lords, it is for each individual NHS trust to determine its policies regarding the provision of changing, laundry and showering facilities. Changing and showering facilities are usually based on the number of staff likely to be using them, as set out in workforce regulations and building guidance.
	The local chief executive has the responsibility to ensure that staff have the necessary facilities, including clothing and equipment, to carry out their work effectively. We have set up an expert working group on the wearing and laundering of uniforms and expect its recommendations by spring 2006.

Baroness Masham of Ilton: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply but do not find it very satisfactory. Does he agree that since we have a National Health Service, hospital infections which spread all over the country—such as MRSA, the diarrhoea C. difficile and all sorts of other infections which cling on to materials—are important? Does he also agree that the public and patients are concerned about seeing nurses around supermarkets and on buses and tubes? Should there not be minimum standards for the National Health Service across the country?

Lord Warner: My Lords, we have given guidance in this area. The noble Baroness is quite right, these are serious issues. It comes down to people at local trust level using that guidance to apply appropriate services locally. I have taken on the responsibility of reviewing whether the changing and laundry policies should be revised, but we have advice from microbiologists that washing uniforms at home at the domestic clothes washer's temperature of 60° centigrade followed by a rinse cycle is more than adequate in these circumstances.

Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, as I understand it, that is not the advice of representatives of the laundry industry who say that a domestic machine washing at 60° is not sufficient to remove these nasty diseases from clothing.

Lord Warner: My Lords, we accept that some uniforms are heavily soiled and require a little more attention. However, I repeat—I give the noble Lord the benefit of this advice—microbiologists advise that a domestic clothes washer's temperature of 60° centigrade followed by a rinse cycle is more than adequate. The main point is the enormous dilution factor of the wash rather than the actual killing of the bacteria. The strapline is "the solution for pollution is dilution".

Lord Sheldon: My Lords, I declare an interest as a shareholder in a company that supplies linen to laundries. I understand that some nurses not only wash their uniforms at home but actually wear them on the way to work. How can we be sure that they are properly sterilised?

Lord Warner: My Lords, that is a fair point. The issue of nurses wearing their uniforms and possibly—if I may put it this way—leaning over the fresh fruit and vegetables in the supermarket is of public concern and is being looked at. There are some professional responsibilities here and our advice is that nurses in these circumstances should wear clothing on top of their uniforms. This is a reputation issue and the public may worry about any risks.

The Countess of Mar: My Lords, could not the Department of Health take a leaf out of the Food Standards Agency book? With food production you are required to wear protective clothing not to protect yourself but to protect the food from being polluted. Therefore, a doctor's white coat is to save not the doctor from getting dirty but the patient from being infected by the doctor. Nurses wear these silly little plastic aprons which hardly cover them; the big, old-fashioned aprons, which are changed frequently, would give much more protection.

Lord Warner: My Lords, I always bow to the noble Countess's knowledge in this area, but we are operating on the best advice available to us. We are looking into these issues in a review and we must wait for that to finish so that we can issue further guidance if we need to.

Baroness Barker: My Lords, given that the Government are about to legislate on MRSA in the Health Bill, what research has been done into the incidence of infection control in relation to laundry services in different parts of acute hospitals? Also, how many acute hospitals have their own laundry services?

Lord Warner: My Lords, a number of acute hospitals have their own laundry services. I can find out the exact numbers and write to the noble Baroness. We know that the number of items laundered in the NHS has continued to rise from about 400 million to more than 500 million in the past three or four years, so a good standard of service is being applied. I will write her on the issue of research because I do not have the details in my head.

Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords—

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe: My Lords, this side.

Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, we have just had a Labour speaker.

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe: No, my Lords, we have not.

Lord Grocott: My Lords, so far we have had four Cross Bench, two Liberal, two Labour and three Conservative speakers, so I think Labour has it.

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe: My Lords, although I welcome the news that we will have a review that will report in the spring, could we make certain that that it looks at European practice? The information that I have indicates that, in some European countries, legislation exists to prevent nurses and doctors going out into the streets in their uniforms. They must change before they go out. Could we ensure that, while we are trying to raise expenditure in the NHS to European standards, we also try to do the same in this area?

Lord Warner: My Lords, we are always willing to learn from abroad. I will ensure that that is looked into in the review that I have mentioned.

Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, does the Minister agree that laundry is a complex matter? The national health trust that I chair had to move out our laundry because we needed the space and wanted a more efficient service. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee of a more satisfactory service. The supply of uniforms from laundries—their vested interests are behind this Question—must be carefully considered. Surely, for the most serious areas of infection, disposable uniforms and equipment are the answer.

Lord Warner: My Lords, the noble Baroness has great experience in this area. She is probably right. In the review, we are looking to see what the best arrangements can be.

NHS Dentistry

Baroness Harris of Richmond: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In so doing, I declare my interest as a member of the court of the University of York.
	The Question was as follows:
	To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to improve the level of National Health Service dental provision in north and east Yorkshire.

Lord Warner: My Lords, in the next two months, three new practices will open in north and east Yorkshire—in Skipton, Beverley and Driffield. A fourth practice, in Filey, is doubling its capacity. The strategic health authority has benefited from substantial recent growth funding of almost £8 million in the past year, benefiting over 400,000 patients. The Department of Health has this year recruited 12 Polish dentists to improve access to dentistry in north and east Yorkshire.

Baroness Harris of Richmond: My Lords, I thank the Minister for his encouraging Answer. However, given the poorer than average dental health among children in the Yorkshire and Humber region and the gap in provision of NHS dentists between the north and south, does he not agree that, to correct the imbalance and address the further dental needs of the area, it is important that a new dental school is established there—especially as experience shows that the majority of dentists who train in an area remain there when their training is completed?

Lord Warner: My Lords, we will, of course, consider that. I do not think that the noble Baroness would expect me to announce a new dental school in her area across the Floor of the House today. I recognise that that is a shameful dereliction of duty, but I am unable to do so. I would just remind her that the Government have expanded the number of dental places and have 859 dentists in training, an extra 189 this year. We are not the party that closed two dental schools in the 1990s.

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: My Lords, when my noble friend is able to announce the establishment of a new dental school in this country, I hope he will take particular account of the qualities displayed by the Hull York Medical School, around which the new dental school is likely to be established. Does he agree that the school's record in developing its reputation in a very short time, two years, augurs very well for a dental school in the area?

Lord Warner: My Lords, we recognise the qualities in all the dental schools that have been producing good quality dentists. I also recognise that this Question is becoming a little like a commercial for new dental schools in different parts of the country.

Lord Colwyn: My Lords, of course I welcome the new dentists in north and east Yorkshire, but can the Minister tell the House what other specific areas will be receiving new dentists and whether they will be working within the general dental services or be principally salaried dentists working within dental access centres?

Lord Warner: My Lords, we are working with local SHAs and PCTs to look at how best to improve the dental services in their areas. Areas other than north and east Yorkshire have also received a lot of attention. A lot of the new services in north and east Yorkshire are personal dental services rather than GDS. We operate with the local people on the basis of the most suitable way of improving services to patients.

Lord Maxton: My Lords, does the water supply for north and east Yorkshire contain the levels of fluoride that would do much to reduce dental decay in the area? Does my noble friend agree that that would be one way in which we could reduce the need for dental provision in that area of the country?

Lord Warner: My Lords, I reassure my noble friend that we are strong supporters of fluoridation and we have enabled people to vote locally on fluoride schemes. I do not have the details of that area in my head but I will write to my noble friend.

Baroness Barker: My Lords, when planning for future provision of dental school places, will the Government use existing access to general dental services and specialist dentist training as one factor in making that decision?

Lord Warner: My Lords, a wide range of issues is taken into account when establishing a new dental school. However, as with medical education, it is often easier to expand quickly by expanding an existing school rather than creating a new one.

Lord Dearing: My Lords, I declare an interest as being of and from Hull. I want to pick up the point that the Minister has just made. I agree with him that economic advantages are to be gained, but perhaps in looking at the proposals it would be right also to consider whether another university or group of universities introducing new ways of training dentists would carry marks.

Lord Warner: My Lords, that is certainly being done in the area of medical education, and I will look to see whether it is being applied in dental education as well.

Earl Howe: My Lords, the Minister will be aware that over the years dentists have complained that they have been on a treadmill without much flexibility to work at a pace of their own choosing. Does he share my concern a the comment by dental bodies that the new draft GDS contract does nothing to alleviate that and that they still fear they will be working on the treadmill that they have known for so many years?

Lord Warner: No, my Lords, I do not accept those concerns. In the past, when dentists were paid for each item of treatment, they rightly complained that they were on a drill-and-fill treadmill. We have negotiated a new contract in which their payment relates to an annual level of activity in return for a guaranteed NHS contract. This activity will be 5 per cent below that performed by dentists in the historic test period, and it will give them plenty of time to work on preventive measures with their patients.

Lord Davies of Coity: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the result of a survey reported this morning states that the dental profession is faced with a challenge because people who benefited from the introduction of the National Health Service are now becoming elderly and are not taking up dentures because their teeth have been well and truly protected? Is it not encouraging that this side of the House, and not the other side, supported the introduction of the National Health Service?

Lord Warner: My Lords, I am always grateful to my noble friends for reminding the House who set up the National Health Service and the benefits that it has provided for the people of this country.

Iraq: Police Force

Lord Garden: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What are the terms of reference of the study by Sir Ronnie Flanagan into the Iraqi police force.

Lord Drayson: My Lords, we keep progress on security sector reform under very close review. As part of that process, we have asked Sir Ronnie Flanagan to provide both his objective assessment of the UK's policing programme in Iraq and recommendations to ensure that UK support is delivering an effective Iraqi police service that serves the needs of all the Iraqi people.

Lord Garden: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that Answer. I am sure that all your Lordships hope that the Army officer who was quoted last Sunday as saying that the situation has now gone too far to be rectified is wrong. Can the Minister assure us that this is happening with the blessing of the Iraqi Government, who will change next week? When will he report to the House the outcome of Sir Ronnie's findings?

Lord Drayson: My Lords, we do not accept the analysis set out by the officer whom the noble Lord mentioned—in fact, quite the opposite. We are getting the sense that our patient strategy within Iraq is working and we are seeing the benefits of that. With regard to the review that is being carried out, Sir Ronnie has already visited Baghdad and Basra in Iraq. He will be visiting again in the early part of next year and will report at the end of January/early February. We have not decided yet whether to publish the results of his review. We will have to look at the recommendations and take a decision then.

Lord Anderson of Swansea: My Lords, to what extent will Sir Ronnie's review be co-ordinated with other contributors to the Iraqi police force training?

Lord Drayson: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for having raised that point. The basis for having carried out the review is absolutely to ensure proper co-ordination of all the activities that we are undertaking in support of the development of the Iraqi security forces. We are seeing real progress. We now have 214,000 members of the Iraqi security forces in place, and we are seeing the benefits of their leadership. They are taking part in or leading over 75 per cent of the security operations now undertaken in Iraq.

Baroness Williams of Crosby: My Lords, the Minister's reply did not address the very many reports from Iraq to the effect that the police service in the region for which we are responsible has been substantially infiltrated by members of the Shia militia. What steps are being taken to ensure that members of the militia are rooted out of the police? What in-service training is there? Does he regard the insurgency militia recruitment problem as having been overcome?

Lord Drayson: My Lords, the purpose of Sir Ronnie's review is to give us a stocktake of the progress that we are making, so that we can ensure that we are making progress in lobbying and encouraging the Ministry of Interior to root out those elements in the police force. It is true that we have had that problem, and it still exists. We should not overestimate the extent of the problem. In three of the four sections of MND Southeast we have no trouble with this at all. The focus is in the Basra area. We are encouraging the Ministry of Interior to be very robust on this matter. We need to see the results of Sir Ronnie's review and then judge whether more needs to be done to accelerate that process.

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, John Reid, the Defence Secretary and the noble Lord's boss, has recognised that this is frankly a serious problem. Sir Ronnie Flanagan has said that policing in the Basra area—in the four provinces that we are concerned with—is one year behind schedule. Is there not a need for some urgency to get a grip on this problem, which the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, has described? Can we afford to wait very long? Should not Sir Ronnie have been given every possible encouragement to deliver a very early report on the infiltration before it leads to more deaths and horrors in the Basra area?

Lord Drayson: My Lords, I think that January next year is pretty early. We have recognised, as my boss has said, that we have an issue—particularly in Basra—with the fact that certain elements have infiltrated the police force. We have a grip on this matter; Sir Ronnie is reviewing how well we are gripping it. We are going to see the results of his review at the end of next month. We will then review that and take the appropriate action immediately.

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean: My Lords, did the Minister really say that he would wait until he had seen the conclusions before deciding to publish the report? Can he expand on that?

Lord Drayson: My Lords, I believe that I was perfectly clear. As I said, we will look at the recommendations. We have no plans at present to publish the review. We will look at it to see what we are able to publish.

Business

Lord Grocott: My Lords, with the leave of the House, there will be a Statement repeated later today by my noble friend Lord Drayson on the board of inquiry on the Hercules crash. It will be between the two major debates.

Business of the House: Debates Today

Lord Grocott: My Lords, on behalf of the noble Baroness the Leader of the House, I beg to move the Motion standing in her name on the Order Paper.
	Moved, That the debate in the name of the Lord Howe of Aberavon set down for today shall be limited to three hours and the debate in the name of the Lord Hurd of Westwell set down for today shall be limited to two and a half hours.—(Lord Grocott.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

UK Worldwide Interests

Lord Howe of Aberavon: rose to call attention to the resources available for the promotion of the worldwide interests of the United Kingdom; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, the House may not be surprised to hear that this is a topic on which I speak with even more than my usual diffidence because it could all too easily be seen as just another episode in a serial in which I have already played too many parts. For four years I was seen as the ruthless scourge of my two predecessors at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my noble friends Lord Carrington and Lord Pym. After rather an exciting role change—from the other side of the street, as it were—I was seen as the spendthrift challenger of my noble friend Lord Lawson.
	I have also, I am afraid, given a demonstration, some 20 years ago, of the banana skins that lie in the path of Foreign Secretaries dealing with the issues we are discussing today. I have to confess that when I was obliged to announce the closure of a relatively small number of posts including, fatefully as it turned out, the consulate at Salonika, it served to provoke an immense explosion from my distinguished constituent who had been the chairman of the selection committee which had at last enabled me to secure a foothold in the other place. I had forgotten, if I had ever known, that he had been for 50 years the president of the Salonika Veterans Association.
	This short and flatteringly crowded debate offers scope for discussion, I hope, of every item of the overseas budget. I can do no more than offer an illustrative framework. I look forward particularly to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Patten of Barnes. He is himself almost, in his own modest words, "not quite a diplomat".
	I shall focus on two themes: first, the range of services which risk being damagingly reduced in the present situation; and, secondly, the quality of what has traditionally and rightly been known as the Diplomatic Service. Decline in those two respects would have very serious implications for the future. Why has that happened? Although the objectives of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have remained broadly unchanged since they were first set out, for example, in the first annual report for the department by my noble friend Lord Hurd, they are much the same in the foreword written by the present Foreign Secretary to the 2003 White Paper, The United Kingdom's International Priorities (CM 6052). The objectives and the purposes remain the same. But the burden of implementation has been and is being remorselessly increased for all sorts of reasons. There is a steady growth in the international community. When my noble friend Lord Carrington first went into office there were 126 members of the United Nations. When I left in 1989 there were 164. Today there are 191. That is an explosive growth in the nations with which we have to deal. Travel by Britons overseas has been growing on a similar scale, with 14 million visits five years ago and 15.4 million today. So, too, have the hazards of the world in which they travel, ranging—if I may offer shorthand definitions—from Bali to tsunami to Katrina—so that requests for consular services have doubled in that same period to 80,000 a year.
	The third factor which creates the difficulties is the presumption that there should be no increase in real terms of the core budget of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and that the Diplomatic Service is always ripe for reduction rather than for any other treatment. Two words are offered by way of guidance to the Foreign Secretary in this respect. The first is the obligation to reprioritise—not a very elegant word—which means to cut or discard some of what is already being done on the assumption that much of what was being done is expendable and can be disposed of. That is just not so. Some may be ripe for reduction but not on the scale expected.
	The second ugly word is to "delayerise". I shall come back to that later if I have to. Both of those words all too often mean to cut, to curtail, to scrap or to eliminate in circumstances where it is often not just imprudent, but unacceptable.
	I shall give some examples of reprioritisation in respect of non-departmental public bodies, as the jargon has it. My first example is the British Association for Central and Eastern Europe. The noble Lord, Lord Radice, takes a particular interest in it, but cannot be here today. In December three years ago, a letter from the Foreign Secretary assured him that the Foreign Secretary had great regard for the experience and skills of great value in that centre and that it would remain in action. Yet, less than three years later, he was served with what is, in effect, a notice for the extinction of that body, although there is still much to do in the countries to the east of the European Union.
	Secondly, there is the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, in which I declare a conjugal interest because my noble wife was for some time a member of the board of that organisation. It, too, has been subjected to an examination by outside consultants, on the basis that it is for the organisation to prove its right to survive. At the end of it—as I understand it, but I have not yet seen it officially confirmed—it has been acquitted of the right to die, and is going to survive, but after the expenditure of a consultation fee of about £50,000 on that exercise.
	Thirdly, there is the Great Britain China Centre, in which I declare an interest as its president for all too many years. It has been in existence much longer than me and, as China has developed and marched further on to the world stage, it has been seen as invaluable by stakeholders in the Peoples' Republic of China as well as here. It could not be less appropriate for us to have been subjected to a similar scrutiny that has just drawn to a conclusion at a cost of £30,000. We await the final verdict on our future with eager anticipation. I hope I am not wrong to be eager about the conclusion, because it would be folly indeed to do anything to threaten the survival of the centre.
	Another example, perhaps less important in some ways, is the pattern of sponsored visits to this country and the range of scholarships—Chevening scholarships and Marshall scholarships, for example—that seem to have been reducing in value, duration and scope in recent years, partly in order to fulfil, so far as possible, the Prime Minister's pledge that the numbers would increase, although the numbers appear to be diminishing as well. Sadly, this is often to the disadvantage of the smaller territories. I take as an example Guyana, from which the noble Baroness the Leader of the House comes, as does another distinguished individual, the former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Sir Sonny Ramphal. Smaller territories appear to be missing out in the attempt to take sufficient notice of the larger territories.
	A third example, and one that is perhaps most important in this context, is the treatment being given to language training and allowances in the Diplomatic Service. Until five years ago, diplomats were not only paid a language allowance at a level depending on their success in examinations while serving in the country where that language was spoken—which is still the position—but they also received the allowance at half the rate after leaving that country, provided they passed the relevant examination every five years. That allowance no longer exists. It is important to recognise its value. I experienced it when I visited Hungary a couple of months ago. I was reminded that on my first visit in 1983, our then ambassador, Sir Bryan Cartledge—I do not think he was then "Sir", but he was the ambassador—was a fluent Hungarian speaker and, as a Russian speaker, he went on to Moscow. On my last visit, I met Mr John Nichols, who is another Hungarian speaker. Every one of the four intervening ambassadors in that post has been able to speak Hungarian. In almost every case they have been the only head of mission in that capital who could speak the native language, which gave them a primacy of great importance. That is an illustration of what we mean when we talk about Britain punching above her weight—a phrase about which there has always been a degree of dissent between my noble friend Lord Hurd and myself. He seeks to disclaim its authorship but I am not reluctant to make such a claim, although I doubt whether I did. I dare say I got it from somewhere. It is a very good phrase anyway.
	In light of that, your Lordships will not be surprised to hear that at a leadership conference held in the Foreign Office about a year ago, at which many heads of mission were present—I dare say that the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, was there—one of them said that he regretted that we could not do for our successors what they had been able to do for us, to invest in the long-lasting skills and qualities of the Diplomatic Service.
	What about delayering? The noble Lord, Lord Triesman, will recollect that we discussed an example of that in the House on 2 November at col. 195 when debating the replacement of the Director for the Americas. Robert Culshaw was one of my many former private secretaries, who although their numbers are diminishing are still strewn around the service. He has had a distinguished career as the noble Lord rightly said. At the age of 53 Robert Culshaw is leaving the service and is being replaced by Mr Steven Williams, whom I do not know, but I have no reason to doubt his qualities. Indeed, I am sure that they are fine. The post is being downgraded from director to head of department. As the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, was careful to point out on that occasion, Mr Williams has
	"considerable experience of both Latin America and the Caribbean Department".—[Official Report, 2/11/05; col. 197.]
	The noble Lord did not add that he had had no experience of North America, which is not necessarily an absolute disqualification, but coupled with the downgrading of the post, it is not the right signal to give, whatever the talents of Mr Williams. That is taking place in a setting in which a great many more things are being done to reduce the significance of our service. I shall not try to touch on every post that has been closed in the past couple of years. I have no time to speak about Madagascar, although others will surely have something to say.
	Since April 2003, in the Americas region no fewer than 10 posts have been closed, including four embassies and one High Commission. I have no doubt that my noble friends Lord Garel-Jones and Lady Hooper will have something to say about that. The downgrading of the first example of the Americas has to be seen as part of the deliberate shrinkage of the service. It is delayering in response to the Collinson Grant report of January this year. I should like to know the cost of that consultation. There is not just a deliberate shrinkage of the service, but an equally deliberate replacement of the career planning structure, which has been part of the success of the service heretofore. It was the key to the achievement of the Budapest-style continuity, to which I have referred.
	That has been replaced in whole or in part by competitive advertising of jobs within and without the service so that a spell in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is in danger of being regarded as just a step or two in portfolio careers. That is in sharp contrast to the pattern sought but not always achieved in large multinational companies to have the right person in the right place to secure the full benefit of the training and experience that they have received.
	Sadly that concept of service, which also applies to the Armed Forces, is not just about applying for jobs and getting them. A pattern of development is important. Up to 20 per cent of the senior management structure, of which Robert Culshaw formed a part, is now said to be following his example and seeking early retirement. If that is so it is a sad and damaging situation. It sits disturbingly alongside the objective proclaimed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary in his foreword to his 2003 strategy document, when he said that,
	"the FCO must preserve the diplomatic expertise, knowledge and professionalism that are its core strength, rightly admired across the world".
	Of course, I am not arguing that there should not be planning and effective control of public expenditure, but I invite reconsideration of the balance between the three aspects of overseas expenditure—defence, development and diplomacy. To take one example of defence, not long ago the MoD produced its Major Projects Report 2005, which states:
	"The Department expects . . . its top 20 equipment projects will meet Key User Requirements"—
	that is at least reassuring—
	"but at a cost of £29 billion, some 10 per cent higher than the expected cost at approval".
	We understand why the MoD was never the favourite department in the Treasury when I was there. But think of that figure.
	DfID is of course important in itself, but enhanced only if it is accompanied by effective diplomacy. In the six years since 1999, DfID's budget has expanded from £2,764 million to £4,481 million. That is an expansion of £1,717 million, which is almost twice the core budget of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at the end of that period. So I remind the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary and his representative here on Earth—the noble Lord, Lord Triesman—of the statement from which I have just quoted:
	"the FCO must preserve the diplomatic expertise, knowledge and professionalism that are its core strength, rightly admired around the world".
	Defence, development and diplomacy: of those three, diplomacy is not the least important. I beg to move for Papers.

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, on securing this debate and I thank him for the typically comprehensive and thoughtful way in which he opened our discussion. Perhaps I may also thank him for all the help and advice that he has given me in the past. It is one of the great strengths of your Lordships' House that, whatever our political differences, those of us who share a common interest in a subject can and do share real and helpful exchanges on the matters of concern to us. Of course, we all look forward very much to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes. He is a distinguished and welcome addition to this House, is no stranger to the Foreign Office and is able to speak from experience.
	It is now more than 30 years since I became a civil servant. Since then, I have represented some of the most senior civil servants, some of whom often sit on the Benches in your Lordships' House. Latterly, I have spent eight years as an FCO and MoD Minister. In all that time I have never known a government department which believed that it was resourced to do all that it was charged to do. It is the common currency of government departments—particularly their Secretaries of State and Permanent Secretaries—to fight tooth and nail for their departments' budgets in the annual scrap with the Treasury.
	The rules of the game are very clear. Departments argue ferociously for a great deal more money, describing the dire consequences if they do not get it. The Treasury argues every bit as fiercely to save taxpayers' money and points out that government departments can and do survive by constantly looking at their own procedures to ferret out that fat which certainly arises in all bureaucracies.
	That said, the Foreign Office has achieved some extraordinary results on a budget which is under more pressure now than I can recall at any time in the past eight years. According to this year's annual report, the core budget for the FCO is £854 million—a sum which must cover all our subscriptions to international organisations and out of which the FCO pays for 233 diplomatic missions around the world. This year, the FCO has succeeded in securing the modest increase in real terms of 1.2 per cent.
	The FCO's annual report sets out comprehensively what it does with those resources, but perhaps I may speak from personal experience. First, foreign policy is not a niche activity. The Foreign Office is now a global network for the whole of UK government activity. The Foreign Office's links with DfID, the MoD and DTI are of course well established in respect of overseas development, defence and trade. But, increasingly, the Foreign Office promotes policy on domestic issues which have become globalised: for example, the Home Office on crime, immigration and asylum; the Department of Health on the diseases of poverty, malaria, tuberculosis and the scourge of HIV/AIDS; Defra on the environment and climate change; and the Department for Education and Skills on international co-operation and exchanges, and, of course, our greatest export—the English language.
	The mainstreaming of domestic policy into foreign policy is a real change. It is a clear and growing part of our agenda that makes new demands upon our diplomats and on their resources. The second change is an obvious one: the increase in acts of terrorism and the threat of terrorism around the world. The Foreign Office's role in dealing with terrorism is pivotal in multinational forums and in our bilateral relationships. The resourcing implications are enormous. The FCO now has to spend a hugely increased budget to secure its people in our missions overseas. From our devastated and beautiful consulate in Istanbul to the measures we have now had to take in 167 of our posts overseas, we have a duty of care for all our staff, and the Foreign Office needs the resources to discharge that duty fully.
	That brings me to the third point. Preventive action is always better than dealing with the aftermath of a failure to act, not only in human terms but in terms of hard cash. Better by far to build up resources on counter-terrorism than to try to repair wrecked lives and the physical damage to buildings and infrastructure—and, yes, to our trade as well. Nowhere is this more obvious than in foreign policy. Of course, sometimes military action is inevitable, and we can all argue about the point at which such decisions are appropriate, but diplomacy can and does work, often by supporting and encouraging others to find a way to talk to each other. We can look at India and Pakistan over Kashmir; diplomacy in Macedonia; the struggles to go forward in Sudan; the E3 with Iran; and the huge and sustained efforts in the Middle East.
	So prevention is always better than cure, but it is not cheap. It involves people of real experience who know the history and personalities of the countries involved inside out, and building that trust and experience takes years. When the going gets bad, it takes a lot to keep going. It involves not only all those attributes, but also good judgment and a touch of wisdom.
	One of the most regrettable outcomes of the recent publicity generated by the memoirs of one of our former ambassadors to Washington is the reawakening of an image of our diplomatic service as an overindulged, rather self-important glitzy clique that owes more to the 1980s than to the 21st century. My experience of the diplomatic community is very different: modest, discreet, full of good judgment and not given to blowing its own trumpet. It is to these people we owe the most, particularly the, often young, people who deal with our consular services.
	The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, has said that public expectations of what the FCO should be doing for Britons abroad has changed out of all recognition. It is the benefit that most British people expect from the FCO. They may not dwell on our policies in remote parts of the world, but they want, and believe they have a right to expect, British Government help if they get into trouble overseas. FCO responses have improved, particularly in the creation of the consular rapid deployment team for when disaster strikes. The FCO continues to learn hard lessons, however, and all of us who are debating today must consider whether the resourcing in this crucial area of consular support is adequate to meet the needs and legitimate expectations of the people of this country.
	My last point will perhaps be thought somewhat controversial, but one of the benefits of leaving ministerial office is that it has certain compensations. I cannot understand why ambassadors no longer have the budgets they used to, to deploy in pursuance of government policy in the countries in which they serve. The FCO is fizzing with ideas and projects. In the area I know best, the Middle East, I could have spent the meagre budget I had over and over again on global outreach, including the growth of civil society, encouraging democracy, dialogue between the religions, empowering women, promoting the rule of law and human rights—and, believe you me, that was even more true of my ambassadors. Instead, the money was in DfID, much of it channelled through UN agencies and into EU funds, which—and I know this is controversial—simply did not have the expertise that we had in our own Foreign Office back yard. I think that needs looking at.
	Having got that off my chest, I will finish with this. We all know that the best resource is people. That is a two-way street. We have terrific people in the Foreign Office. They give us great service, and they deserve to have us invest in them.

Lord Garden: My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, for this opportunity to acknowledge the contribution made by so many different parts of the United Kingdom community, both governmental and non-governmental, to the promotion of our interests abroad. I also welcome the fact that we will be able to hear the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes, make his important maiden speech in this House.
	Your Lordships will not be surprised that I shall concentrate my remarks on the first of the noble and learned Lord's Ds—defence and the work of the British military—first, to recognise the extraordinary contribution that our Armed Forces make around the world; and, secondly, to express concerns about the extent to which they will be able to continue this work in the future.
	During the Strategic Defence Review, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, made defence diplomacy one of the eight core tasks for the Armed Forces. I was included in the study for that review, specifically looking at defence diplomacy, and I have subsequently done research work at King's College London for the Ministry of Defence on measuring effectiveness in this area. As we conducted field trips to look at training teams, at loan service personnel and at graduates of British military courses, I was surprised, as were my academic colleagues, at the sheer range of influence which the United Kingdom gains for remarkably small investment. Within the field of defence diplomacy, the training of international students within the United Kingdom also plays an important part, as I know from my time as commandant at the Royal College of Defence Studies. That extends beyond senior military personnel to foreign government officials, who move on to leadership posts in their countries. The long-term pay-offs to British interests can be very high indeed.
	I particularly welcome the developing co-operation that has grown between the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and DfID, despite what the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, has just said about problems between the Foreign Office and DfID. This has happened since the establishment of the Global Conflict Prevention Pool and the similar pool focused on sub-Saharan Africa. The arrangement has encouraged the departments to work together to seek the best joint way of promoting stability in difficult areas of the world. Success in this can bring great dividends for British influence.
	As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, said, the money allocated remains relatively small in defence terms, and the problems of the Middle East are diverting a disproportionate amount of even those small resources. Your Lordships have often talked about the overstretch of British forces as they undertake the operational tasks in Iraq, increasingly in Afghanistan, still in the Balkans and elsewhere, and have to cope with the downsizing of all three services. When priorities must be chosen, it is not surprising if the immediate operational tasks get preference. Yet influence and trust overseas can be built only over a period of years. A training team in a difficult country will gain access only as it demonstrates continuing, sustained commitment. The operational overstretch makes it more difficult for the services to provide people for training teams, loan service, advisory posts, and even to leaven the international courses with British military officers at places such as the Royal College of Defence Studies.
	Disaster relief has also, unhappily, become a more frequent requirement for British foreign action. Rapid and generous help to devastated regions builds friends in those regions and increases the United Kingdom's standing both locally and internationally. Yet we have recurring problems with the mechanics of deploying defence assets in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed. Air transport, both fixed-wing and helicopter, remain the key to rapid and effective relief operations.
	I am not making a plea for an increase in the defence budget: it has seen a marginal real increase in funds in recent years. Yet that money is not going towards these sorts of operations. Transport helicopters are already in short supply and have been in constant use for operational reasons. When I asked the Defence Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, about plans for increasing transport helicopter numbers, his Written Answer on 24 October made it clear that there will be no more transport helicopters over the next five years. The money is going to attack and reconnaissance helicopters. Given the role that transport helicopters have in every aspect of modern military operations, this is a very surprising state of affairs and one which affects the good that we can do around the world.
	In that respect, I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work done by three Royal Air Force Chinooks deployed to help with the Pakistan earthquake. It is clear from the reports that have come back that they have achieved an enormous amount. It is not just the lifting capacity of the Chinook, it is the military organisation that supports it. Loads are used efficiently and sorties are not wasted, because re-supply is what the crews and their Army and RAF support teams are trained for. In 28 days, those three helicopters moved 1,700 tonnes of food, shelter and medical supplies to inaccessible places. However, I had to look deep on the DfID website to find out that they ceased operations on the 25 November 2005, after just 28 days. There was no fanfare of trumpets for them coming home. It would be helpful if the Minister could indicate why they have been withdrawn. Have all the problems gone away? Do they no longer need helicopters in the region? In the battle for hearts and minds in the Islamic world, these sorts of contributions are beyond price.
	The British military are but one resource that the UK has available to promote its interests around the world. Democracy is more likely to grow from our efforts in sustained security sector reform than in quick, offensive military operations. The Foreign Office and the Department for International Development should take a keen interest in the MoD equipment programme, and make their future needs clear. The £5.5 billion that the Iraq adventure has cost the UK so far could have bought much greater influence throughout the world than has been the case. Let us learn from our mistakes.

Lord Wright of Richmond: My Lords, I believe that I am not required to declare an interest as a former head of the Diplomatic Service, but I would nevertheless like to declare my continuing admiration for what I still believe is the best—if seriously under-resourced—Diplomatic Service in the world. I think that I have quoted before in this House a remarkable tribute paid to the British Diplomatic Service by a former French foreign minister, Monsieur Couve de Murville who described our Diplomatic Service as the second best in the world.
	I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, for initiating this important debate. Having accompanied him, on at least three occasions, for the FCO's annual public expenditure "scrap"—if I can call it that—with the Treasury, I have some experience of the difficulties which Foreign and Commonwealth Secretaries regularly face in trying to limit the damage imposed on the Diplomatic Service by persistent Treasury pressure on an FCO budget which, even including the sums allocated to the British Council and the BBC World Service, is less than one-third of 1 per cent of overall government spending; one of the smallest budgets in Whitehall.
	I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes, whose maiden speech we much look forward to hearing today, will allow me to quote the following from his book Not Quite the Diplomat. He writes:
	"Foreign ministers are not very interested in budgets, which is one reason why they get pushed around so much by finance ministers who see foreign ministry resources as an easy target for cost-cutting".
	Since there have been several references to the differences between the FCO and DfID, I would like to pay a tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Patten, for having taken the initiative, when he was Minister for Overseas Development and I was Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, of inviting me to join his policy meetings whenever I could. He made a significant difference to the relationship between our two departments.
	I was grateful for the assurance given to the House by the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, on 2 November that it is still the policy of Her Majesty's Government to pursue a global foreign policy. The Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary's statement of 15 December 2004 no doubt represents the outcome of some painful and agonising decisions on how to meet the continuing demands of such a policy within the inadequate resources allocated to the Diplomatic Service. Many of us will have personal reasons to lament the closure or downgrading of particular posts, but there are two aspects to post closures which I should like to draw to your Lordships' attention. The first is that diplomacy is largely about making, retaining and passing on personal contacts—what an American book once called making friends and influencing people—a process in which the reduced programme of sponsored visits plays an important part. Once a post is closed, that process of contact-making is severely curtailed until—as often happens—it is later decided, at considerable and unnecessary cost, that the post should after all be reopened. In this uncertain world, a post which appears unimportant today may turn out to be crucial for British interests tomorrow.
	The second point relates to our experience during the Falklands War. Although the diplomatic skills of our Ambassador to Washington and our Permanent Representative to the United Nations were rightly praised at the time, too little attention has been paid to the massive and persistent efforts by our diplomatic posts around the world, and in particular with the non-permanent members of the Security Council that year, such as Panama and Togo, to support our case.
	I do not propose today to rehearse my familiar criticisms of the Iraq war, but there is one lesson which I hope has been learnt from the many mistakes which have been made over the invasion of Iraq—and that is that wars cannot be waged solely by the military. I have no way of knowing whether Sir Christopher Meyer is right in saying that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was regularly bypassed in contacts between 10 Downing Street and Washington over the invasion of Iraq. But the extent to which the Pentagon excluded the skills and professional advice of American diplomacy and foreign policy over Iraq was largely responsible for the lack of adequate planning for the aftermath. Defence and foreign policy go hand in hand, and it would be a serious tragedy if inadequate resources for the Diplomatic Service were to lead to underperformance by the Foreign Office side of that partnership, both in offering experienced and professional advice to Ministers, and in having the right people in the right posts and, incidentally, speaking the right language, to promote British political, strategic, economic and commercial interests, quite apart from the consular capacity to help British subjects in trouble.
	I have much sympathy for my former colleagues—I suppose that I am their former colleague—who had to make these painful recommendations to their Ministers. I do not intend to question the Minister about particular post closures beyond asking him, as the Minister for Africa, whether sufficient thought was given to the implications of closing three sovereign posts in that continent on the eve of the Prime Minister's much vaunted Year of Africa. I hope that the Minister will carry back to his colleagues in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Treasury a message from this House—that if we are to continue to conduct a global foreign policy there must be adequate resources to do the job.

Lord Patten of Barnes: My Lords, all of us know that one of the consequences of the increase in public debt, the fall in the growth rate and the rather lame performance in productivity, to which the Chancellor owned up at the beginning of this week, more or less—I think probably less rather than more—is that over the rest of this Parliament we will see rising taxes and a squeeze on public spending. It makes a mock of our intelligence to suggest other than that. What does that presage? One thing that it clearly presages is another assault on the budgets of the Foreign Office, the British Council and the BBC World Service.
	It is a curiosity of public life in this country that we review so frequently and underfund so equally regularly the things that we do best and the institutions which are most admired around the world. There is another review in train on our public diplomacy. I am sure that the noble Lord responsible for it will conduct it extremely well, but I ask myself: what is wrong with our public diplomacy? The institutions of private and public diplomacy in this country are widely admired around the world. Where we are unpopular—for example, in parts of the Islamic world—it is not because of failings in our public diplomacy, but because of the policies that we have pursued. It is rather easier to change the policies than the institutions of public diplomacy.
	The Prime Minister, whose chutzpah we should, I suppose, rather admire, offers us the vision of a Gladstonian foreign policy for this country. It is a tad vainglorious to propose a Gladstonian foreign policy without the Gladstonian resources to follow it through. As my noble and learned friend said at the beginning of the debate, we cannot cut much of a dash in the world if we do not adequately resource the Foreign Office, the British Council and the BBC World Service. It is difficult to retain the enthusiasm for our national values if we assault, once again, the budget of the BBC World Service. I will say in passing that it is a rum old world in which Mr Rupert Murdoch suggests that the Prime Minister probably prefers Fox News to the BBC.
	My second point is an institutional one, which has already been touched on rather delicately. Perhaps I bring to our discussion too much of the bruiser habits of another place, but we all know that the Treasury hates the Foreign Office, and has done so for as long as I can remember. The Treasury thinks that the Foreign Office is a waste of space. The mindset, if I may follow the noble Baroness, is that all ambassadors wear red socks and that their principal function is exchanging gossip at the glitzy cocktail parties to which the noble Baroness referred. I suspect that the present Chancellor's personal prejudices reinforce the institutional prejudices of the department that he leads.
	In addition, the Prime Minister, whose profound belief in his own diplomatic skills is not perhaps always borne out by what happens—one considers, in passing, the present discussion about the EU rebate—has brought into No. 10 a great deal of policy-making from the Foreign Office. The noble Lord who has just spoken touched on some consequences of that. Despite the abilities of the officials concerned, the results have not been conspicuously successful.
	What has happened as a result is that the Foreign Office has been pushed into a rather defensive posture. It seeks to justify itself not by what it does best, which is to define and pursue our national interest in both political and commercial terms, but by turning itself into a sort of glorified management consultancy. Almost every ambassador and senior official with whom I have spoken in recent years has grumbled about being drowned in questionnaires and choked in management guff. That is not good management of a great public service. Frankly, a lot of it is charlatanry, as Peter Drucker would have said; and charlatanry at the behest of the Treasury.
	The last point that I want to make will sound a little counter-intuitive. Yet in spite of the death and destruction from Haiti and Colombia, via west Africa and Sudan, to Iraq and Afghanistan, we have actually become better in the past few years at avoiding conflict. The number of conflicts has fallen dramatically, while the number of casualties as a result of conflicts has also fallen dramatically.
	When I was Minister for Overseas Development, I sometimes used to worry that our ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, often necessary because of political failure, was greater than our ability to prevent the political failure in the first place. But there has been remarkable progress in the past few years. We have done a lot better through proactive diplomacy in preventing conflicts. I have seen a great deal of that myself, in my previous job, for example, in the Balkans, where this country played a formidable role. It is equally the case in west Africa. It makes no sense whatever to cut back on the resources that are required to conduct that proactive diplomacy—the resources that are required to ensure rather greater peace and stability around the world. We can do better, but we need the resources to do the job.
	I have one further point—my noble and learned friend touched on it at the outset in discussing the origin of a phrase that we all use. It has been a feature of our debates about Britain's role in the world in the past 40 or 50 years to discuss how we can ensure that the rest of the world sees us as a great country even though we are no longer a great power. We often talk about how we can be seen to "punch above our weight" to borrow that expression again. I do not want to be seen to be borrowing from my noble and learned friend's previous use of sporting metaphors but it is very difficult to punch, let alone above your weight, if you do not have boxing gloves. I very much hope, for what it is worth, that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will bear that in mind in the months and years ahead.

Lord Haskel: My Lords, it is my privilege to welcome my neighbour in Richmond, the noble Lord, Lord Patten, and to congratulate him on behalf of the whole House on his maiden speech. He is well known to us all because of his commitment and his long career in public life. His initiation in government was in 1983 in Northern Ireland, where he crossed swords with Dr Paisley—probably a baptism of fire. He survived that and went on to occupy many ministerial posts. He became the Governor of Hong Kong in 1992 and gained the respect of us all by the dignified way in which he handed over sovereignty. He went on to be a European Commissioner and is now Chancellor of the University of Oxford.
	In spite of—or perhaps because of—this distinguished career, he is not always narrowly political, and, as he said this morning, he is not tempted by bruiser habits. I think I can safely say that, to most of us, he sets an example of the highest standards in public life.

Noble Lords: Hear, Hear!

Lord Haskel: My Lords, we look forward to hearing the noble Lord on many occasions and benefiting from his wide experience and wisdom.
	A couple of weeks ago, some kind person in the Foreign Office sent me an invitation to a meeting in Portcullis House. It was the annual get-together of the science and innovation department of the Foreign Office, the occasion when staff come to London and compare notes and experiences. I am not sure why I was sent the invitation. Perhaps it was because, five years ago, I had worked with the science attaché in Washington when I was there on official business.
	I had assumed that the position of science attaché in Washington was unique because science in America is a sufficiently important matter to justify an attaché. Imagine my surprise, then, when I went to the meeting to find that there were 44 posts in 29 countries. They worked as a network. The scientists were young—mind you, everyone seems young to me nowadays—but they were not the kind of scientists who learn more and more about less and less. They were diplomats, too, and had a rounded view about the international importance of science. I was impressed.
	When the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, tabled his Motion about the FCO—and I congratulate him on that—I thought that I would draw your Lordships' attention to the science and innovation network. It is a resource that is, and will continue to be, central to the promotion of our worldwide interests. It is central because much of what we want to achieve in our foreign policy is related to science. Let us take as an example an agreement on climate change, as mentioned by my noble friend Lady Symons. Such an agreement is being negotiated at the moment and is a stated priority of our presidency of the G8 and the EU. Diplomacy, foreign policy and science are closely intertwined in this matter.
	Next week, in Hong Kong, we shall be discussing trade liberalisation with poor countries. The trade and development committee of the Doha round has special responsibility to build capacity in these countries, capacity to enable free trade. Central to this building of technical and scientific competence is the creation of a scientific infrastructure so that agriculture can be improved and industry can move into the modern knowledge economy. Scientific capacity is also needed to defeat AIDS and malaria, to improve health generally in these countries, and, incidentally, to slow down international migration of skilled and trained personnel from third world countries. This is science and diplomacy working together.
	Guaranteeing our energy supplies requires science and diplomacy to work together. The world needs international science to help clean up the old sources of energy with clean coal technology and carbon sequestration, which are important to both China and the United Kingdom. We are going to need international scientific collaboration if we are to build a new, modern nuclear power station with minimum waste. And if thermonuclear is an important future energy source, then we will need to be part of an international reactor. These are global concerns which reflect the age we live in—a scientific and diplomatic global age.
	My noble friend Lady Symons and the noble Lord, Lord Garden, spoke of security. Scientific concerns are becoming ever more apparent where our security is concerned. There has to be international collaboration on various aspects of cyberspace, explosives of all kinds and dangerous toxins. We need diplomatic scientists to understand and control these things. It is right that these resources should come from the Foreign Office. The relationship is too close and the risks are too great for divided loyalties.
	Science and diplomacy also go together in regulation. There are worldwide different and conflicting views on regulating many matters: therapeutic cloning; the ozone layer; toxicity of everyday chemicals. Regulation of these matters requires both international diplomacy and scientific understanding to ensure that the international regulatory framework provides a level playing field that encourages innovation but prevents economic and commercial damage from free-riding low minimum standards. Science and diplomacy are a joint thread running through all of this.
	Perhaps the most important way in which science and diplomacy can promote the worldwide interests of this country is to use science to promote British business while at the same time promoting British science to attract new investment into the United Kingdom. This country has been a big investor in science. This Government really believe in the old saying, "If you think science is expensive, try ignorance". I have tried to show that we will benefit from this investment not only through innovation and new technology but also through diplomacy. Science is central to our foreign policy objectives.
	The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, spoke about cuts and de-layering. My noble friend Lady Symons spoke about resources under pressure. I therefore hope that my noble friend the Minister can assure me that the science and innovation unit at the Foreign Office will receive care, attention and support from Ministers, because it is an important resource for the promotion of our worldwide interests.

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon: My Lords, I remind noble Lords that this is a timed debate and the timing is extremely tight. It will be stopped after three hours and we need to leave time for my noble friend to answer all the questions. When the clock moves on to seven, we are actually in the eighth minute. Do forgive me.

Lord Craig of Radley: My Lords, when I was in Lesotho last month, I visited a small museum in Morija, a village about an hour's drive south of the capital, Maseru. On display were a variety of fascinating artefacts and literature about the country and the Basotho people. In the early 1800s French Protestant missionaries were active among the local tribespeople. Later that century, the Basotho were in danger of losing control of their land to Boer settlers. After several wars, the land became a British protectorate. A letter on display in the museum, written by the Basotho chief, Chief Moshoeshoe, to the governor of Cape Province in November 1869 caught my eye. Moshoeshoe, who had been unwell, wrote:
	"I feel a little better, and I won't delay any more in sending to our gracious Queen a token of my gratitude for the precious peace we enjoy since we have been proclaimed British subjects. Men, women and children join me in feelings of gratitude, and we pray the Almighty to bless and keep in his love the Great Queen who so kindly received us as her children".
	Possessing, he said,
	"nothing worthy to be presented to a Great Queen,"
	he nevertheless hoped that the gift of a leopard skin destined for Her Majesty would reach her.
	Seventy years later, over 21,000 Basotho citizens served with the British forces during World War II. Many lost their lives in that conflict. But their commitment to the UK was still as great as in Queen Victoria's reign. They were proud of it. We were grateful for that support. Fast forward another 60 years. What do we find? At the Armistice service in Maseru which I watched on Sunday 13 November, all the custom and ceremonial of such moving occasions—the remembrance of sacrifice, of human tragedy; respect for the dead and wounded—were rigorously observed. It started with a two-minute silence and a trumpeter playing the "Last Post".
	I spoke about this event two weeks ago in the debate on the Commonwealth. I also wrote to the Minister immediately on my return to London to question why there had been no formal British representative to lay a wreath. The King and Queen, members of the Government and several other distinguished citizens all laid a wreath at the foot of the impressive war memorial. Further wreaths were laid by foreign diplomats, but none from Britain. The Americans, the Chinese, the Libyans, the South Africans, the French, the Canadians, the Germans, the Irish and the Dutch were all represented by ambassadors, a high commissioner or consuls and laid wreaths. What a discouraging and discourteous message to send to a proud, now independent, nation that has given blood and loyalty to this country. One of a large number of World War II veterans present—there were well over 150, some still wearing their old uniforms—laid the final wreath. Flying prominently from his black beret was a small Union Jack flag.
	I recount this story, not just to highlight the apparently insensitive way in which today's Government are treating Lesotho, but to draw attention to an even more important general point. Sudden, even small, changes of this nature send an adverse message to a much larger fraternity within the developing nations of the Commonwealth. Many such countries, including Lesotho, have much to offer as they grow—and grow they will. Clearly, with embassies or consular representation in Lesotho, the Chinese, the Americans, the Libyans and others, as well as international organisations such as the UN, the EU and the AU, whose representatives also laid wreaths at the memorial, all feel that there are commercial and other opportunities for the countries that they represent.
	It surprises me that this Government, presumably entirely for financial reasons, are disengaging and not seeking to promote British interests more strongly in the developing nations of the Commonwealth. As the primus inter pares of the Commonwealth of nations, surely it is right that the Commonwealth interests are strongly espoused by this country. While the loyalties of previous generations are being remembered by those who participated, we should not be retrenching and pouring cold water on the past.
	In the time available to me, perhaps I may mention one other aspect of our response to foreign events which falls short of what this country should achieve. I know from the horrific personal experiences of two British friends caught up by the tsunami in Thailand that they were offered far speedier and more relevant help from German diplomats than by staff from our own embassy, and that included the immediate offer of free flights back to Germany.
	Our response to the desperate need for helicopters following the recent earthquake in Pakistan was delayed because decisions to deploy were caught up in an interdepartmental wrangle about which of them should shoulder the costs. Our helicopters stayed for only a month, as the noble Lord, Lord Garden, mentioned, and they have now been withdrawn. We do not seem to have capacity to cope sufficiently with these sorts of disasters and the ongoing demands of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not fair to blame service and civilian individuals who are trying to cope with the problems on the ground as they arise. It seems more a reflection of a systematic failure to appreciate the equipment and manpower limitations and the need to respond at the pace which such disasters demand.
	This is not a new problem; I have seen it happen time and again. The cost of sending RAF helicopters to help Mozambique when that country was flooded in 2001 was disputed between the MoD and DfID, and departure was delayed. The public rightly expect the government of the day to respond to disasters. Money is said to be available, but those on the ground or those trying to get help into the area seem to be frustrated by a lack of rapidly delegated financial responsibility and the authority to get on with it.
	Interdepartmental bickering over which should bear the cost, or delays in authorising those on the spot to provide financial and other assistance, must be handled better. This is an endemic problem, and it does this country, and the many individuals who try to help, little credit. I hope that the Government will deal with it properly and be frank enough to admit to our limitations if they cannot.

Lord Truscott: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes, on his stimulating and challenging maiden speech, and I wish him many happy years on the Benches opposite.
	I say at the outset that I am an ardent supporter of all the institutions under discussion today—namely, the FCO, DfID, the British Council and the BBC World Service. I welcome the fact that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, has initiated this debate, not least to dispel some misconceptions, some of which were mentioned by my noble friend Lady Symons. I also declare an interest as the British Council's parliamentary representative to the Russian Federation and former Soviet Union.
	Although I greatly respect the work of all the institutions I have mentioned, I do not really see that there is a crisis at the heart of this debate. Real funding for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Council and the BBC World Service has increased. Overall, the FCO's budget has increased in real terms by £143 million since 1999–2000. Following the 2004 spending review, like other departments, the FCO has to meet efficiency targets of 2.5 per cent per annum over three years. It will deliver £86 million of savings by 2007–08, and those savings will release more funds for front-line activities.
	The UK must respond to changing priorities. The FCO, for example, has opened 18 new sovereign and subordinate posts with UK-based staff since 1997, along with 13 locally staffed posts. Ten posts have been closed over the same period, and in this regard our record is better than that of France or Germany. There are now 268 posts compared with 266 at the time of the 1997 general election, before which the party of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, was in office. In the past three years alone, reflecting the new global realities, the UK has opened missions in Baghdad, Basra, Kabul and Pyongyang. By comparison, one of the sovereign posts closed was in Nassau in the Bahamas—hardly of the same order of geopolitical importance.
	The FCO's efficiency savings will also allow the UK to focus on its priority areas, including counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism, energy and climate change. In Africa, for example, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office plans to create new jobs to cover some of these issues across the region. There will be a new post in Nairobi to support work on climate change, one in Nigeria to cover energy, and one in Pretoria to cover regional issues.
	All these initiatives are to be welcomed, and they focus rightly on the UK's priorities in today's world rather than reflecting Britain's colonial past. All this was presaged in the December 2003 White Paper, UK International Priorities: A Strategy for the FCO, which was mentioned earlier by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe.
	Although I do not have time to develop the argument, funding for both the BBC World Service and the British Council has also gone up. The former's budget has risen over the past year from £225 million to £239 million, and the latter's will increase from £172 million to £193 million in 2007–08. As has been said during the debate, of course there are always calls on further resources, and the Government must decide where their priorities lie. As has been mentioned, DfID's spending, for example, has dramatically increased over the past few years and reflects the Government's priorities in fighting global poverty and ill health. Who could argue with that? The Government's aim of achieving their target of raising overseas aid to 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2013 is laudable and should be welcomed by your Lordships' House.
	Coming back to the World Service, I argue that it is also right to try to shift the emphasis from eastern and central Europe to parts of the world where democracy and freedom are less in evidence. For that reason, I can see the logic of retargeting the vernacular language services away from Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Slovene, Bulgarian, Portuguese and Croatian. But Kazakh? There I have a question.
	In my view, axing Kazakh is a mistake. Kazakhstan under President Nazarbayev needs all the encouragement possible to become more democratic and less autocratic. Its people need to be able to hear the BBC, just as millions in the old Soviet Union used to tune in to London to listen to propaganda-light news and entertainment. When I go to Russia, people still tell me how during the Cold War they used to tune in, illegally in those days, to the BBC World Service and listen to the news from London. It was very important to them. One of the most famous journalists in Russia today is not Russian but a journalist based at the BBC in Bush House who used to broadcast to Russia.
	I hope that when the Minister replies he will reflect on my last point and accept my suggestion that the BBC World Service should think again before it abandons such a strategically important part of the planet.

Lord Blaker: My Lords, I apologise for having arrived a few minutes late for this debate due to my train being late. I apologise, in particular, to my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon, the beginning of whose speech I missed. As other noble Lords have done, I congratulate him on initiating this debate.
	I declare an interest as a former member of the foreign service, which I served for 11 years. It is not surprising, therefore, that I agree with noble Lords who have supported that service. They are absolutely right. I think, in particular, of the speeches of the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, and my noble friend Lord Patten. They were not the only ones; I just select them because they come from different sides of the House and there has been support for that line of argument from both sides. I simply believe that the foreign service is the best organisation that I have ever had contact with.
	I remember 20 years or so ago attending a reception at No. 10 Downing Street given by the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, who was then Prime Minister, which was for a visiting team of members of the Chinese government. I think that there were five of them, rather remarkably. They came into the room and walked up to the Prime Minister, whom they recognised, and shook her hand. They then looked around the room and they clearly did not recognise anyone apart from one young woman, Kathy Flower, who had been presenting a programme in the English language on Chinese television. They all knew her by sight. I guess that every other member of the Chinese government would have known her if they had been there.
	One of the problems with the Treasury's attitude towards the foreign service is that it is constantly going in for false economies, when it goes for economies, and they are not always the right ones. I served in Cambodia 40 years ago when Cambodia had just become independent after the end of the French Vietnam war. Phnom Penh, which was a delightful little town, was inundated with new embassies. It had not had embassies before because it was only a province of French Indochina. We had a vast American embassy, and we had a tiny British embassy consisting of seven Brits. Other countries had big embassies. That created an enormous housing problem, because houses for western or American people did not exist in any quantity. One of my main tasks as head of chancery was to find new housing for the staff, which was not at all an easy job. I used to drive around Phnom Penh, which fortunately had a grid system as Manhattan does, and stop at every crossroads and look down the road in each direction to see if there were any piles of bricks. If there were, that meant that a Cambodian was building a new house, so I followed that up.
	I was so impressed by the problem that I made a study of the costs that would be incurred if the British embassy bought a piece of land big enough to house the chancery and all the other necessary staff residences. I got a deal with a Cambodian general who owned some land, and he agreed that he would sell it if the British government would agree. The calculation that I made was that we would pay for the whole purchase of the land and the cost of construction in two and a half years. My house at that time—1956—which was in the Cambodian quarters, up on bricks, was costing us £4,000 a month. I thought that was ridiculous, so I sent a report to London urging that we should follow up the idea of buying a property. It was turned down, no doubt because of Treasury opposition. The Treasury's view was that it might only last for two and a half years; in fact it lasted for 20 years, and we still have it now after an interval during the era of Pol Pot. That is a great error. Soon after I came back to this country from Cambodia, I came across an ambassador who had raised with the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Derick Heathcoat Amory, the question of why we insisted on renting so many properties abroad and not building or buying. The Chancellor's answer was, "What policy?". Apparently no one had consulted him about that very expensive means of proceeding.
	The other thing that I want to mention is the tendency for the Government to abolish embassies and high commissions abroad. A list of eight small countries where we are closing or have closed embassies or high commissions was published in Hansard on 11 October at col. WS 13. They are not important countries. Many of them are in the Pacific, which is a very large ocean and a lonely place. It is worth having a small staff in most of these missions for reassurance and in recognition of the fact that all of them have the same vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations as this country does. I am talking about eight countries in this latest bunch of calculations.
	It may be said that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has displayed an interest in foreign affairs in his visits to South Africa and to the Far East. That is a sudden interest on his part, and I wondered whether it meant that there would be a change in his attitude towards the expenditure on the foreign service. I am afraid that I was struck by doubt whether it might in fact be intended to help the promotion of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Lord Garel-Jones: My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking and congratulating the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, on introducing this important debate. I also welcome the maiden speech by my noble friend Lord Patten. We are facing questions about whether Britain wants and needs a global diplomacy and whether we can afford it. The answer to both those questions is yes. By any yardstick, the United Kingdom is one of the four or five most important industrial nations in the world. We have interests. I hope without undue self-congratulation or being holier than thou, we can say that Britain represents certain values as well. We take seriously our position as the oldest parliamentary democracy in the world. Can we afford a global diplomacy? As the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, pointed out, the cost of the British Diplomatic Service is about £850 million per annum—that is out of a total government expenditure of £521 billion. We are talking about 0.16 per cent of total government expenditure. Suffice it to say that last year alone two government departments overspent by more than that amount. No doubt the Treasury feels—I dare say that it is right—that it should go through an expenditure round with the Foreign Office, but the sums involved barely register on the radar screen.
	I propose to concentrate on Latin America. I have the honour of being president of Canning House, a position in which I succeeded my noble friend Lady Hooper. Latin America has 21 countries, a population of 560 million, and a gross domestic product of $2.26 trillion. It is a continent where Spanish is the most widely spoken language. As noble Lords will be aware, Spanish is the most widely spoken language after English in what we used to call the free world. It is the most widely spoken language in the United States of America. Brazil, which does not speak Spanish, exercises an enormous cultural influence. One has only to look at the debates going on about the Doha round to see the importance of Brazil.
	They like us; we have a good history down there. It was George Canning who first dispatched British troops to fight alongside Bolivar in the wars of independence. It was through the City of London that most of the infrastructure that now exists in Latin America was financed and built. Names such as Cochrane, O'Higgins and Brigadier Wright are still commonly talked of in Latin America. How are we doing down there? Well, we have closed four embassies: Paraguay; Nicaragua; El Salvador; and Honduras. No doubt the Treasury even today is congratulating itself on a saving of no less than £1 million. As the noble Lord, Lord Wright, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, have pointed out, the Latin American department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been reduced by something like 40 per cent in the past two years. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, referred to Robert Culshaw, an outstanding Foreign Office official who retired early. The whole department has been reduced in rank.
	The Heads of Mission Gift Scheme, to which the noble Baroness referred, has been cancelled. I just mentioned that we have closed our embassy in Paraguay, where there is one very good example of the Heads of Mission Gift Scheme. When we had an embassy there, out-of-use fire engines from the United Kingdom were brought to Asuncion, and there is now a fire station called the Grand Britannia fire station. While we may not have an embassy, at least there is a fire station with our name on it. When a tragic fire took place in Asuncion recently, that fire station played a sterling role.
	We are sliding almost unnoticed into the second division. I bow to no one in my desire and wish to see the European Union flourish but I can predict that, at the present rate, in 15 or 20 years' time we shall find ourselves with one embassy in Mexico, one in Brazil and in all the other 20 republics we shall no doubt be represented by the European Union. I do not think that that is good enough.
	I think that it is now possible to talk, without sounding faintly ludicrous, about the next Conservative government. Wisely, the new leader of the Conservative Party has set up a series of policy groups to look at policy in all areas. That is precisely what my noble friend Lady Thatcher did in the late 1970s; indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Patten, was instrumental in many of those committees. I very much hope that they will look seriously at the way in which the Foreign Office is being funded. Just as in the 1970s the opposition made a commitment to increase in real terms the defence expenditure by the incoming Conservative government over the first term of office, I hope that the policy committees will come to the conclusion that Britain is still a nation: that our interests and values need to be upheld throughout the world. If the Government decide to take that on board, they will enjoy the support of the Conservative Opposition, as the Leader of the Opposition said yesterday. If they do not, I hope that the next Conservative government will go into the election with a commitment over their first term in office to increase expenditure on our foreign service in real terms by between 3 and 5 per cent.

Baroness D'Souza: My Lords, I have been in this House a relatively short time but during that time have learnt that sooner or later the opportunity to express a cherished view will arise. Just such an opportunity has arisen today and I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, for providing the occasion.
	I have spent quite a lot of my working life in underdeveloped countries where resources are scarce if not absent; and every time I visit those countries I am both taken aback and humbled by the esteem in which the UK is held. It is a rather curious phenomenon. Other countries may give more money, more technical assistance, more commercial opportunities and, possibly, more encouragement to young people to avail themselves of educational opportunities. But still the UK counts—and counts for quite a lot. What, I ask myself, are we doing to deserve this esteem, or perhaps what are we doing to preserve it?
	What we are doing is the British Council. For more than seven decades governments have continued to fund the British Council to seek and create enduring cultural relations—and long may that funding continue and increase. I declare an interest as a parliamentary ambassador for the British Council. The British Council is a good thing. It induces a warm feeling. It undoubtedly has the good housekeeping seal of approval. But how many really know what it does, the range and diversity of its programmes and its impact?
	Let us take Afghanistan as an example—a country devastated by wars, civil unrest, religious fanaticism and extreme poverty. The whole humanitarian world is now there, largely in Kabul, albeit in an unco-ordinated and sometimes inappropriate series of projects. But what do people, not governments, want? They want their children to be educated so that they can become part of the international community. They want to participate tangibly in building a new country and they want to forge friendships with the British and with their institutions. The council is working on several projects—for example, training and networking sessions for potential women parliamentarians and civil service reform—all of which will contribute to the development of a civil society culture in Afghanistan. In turn, that will provide the bedrock for democratic development.
	In Iraq, the British Council is creating a few oases of cultural freedom in the midst of chaos. The aim was to end that country's educational isolation especially at the higher and technical levels. Training and networking events have been held, leadership courses run and resource centres set up. The focus on capacity building is again the essential basis for the growth of democratic institutions; and there is now a partnership arrangement involving 14 colleges and institutions in Iraq linked with eight colleges of higher education in the UK.
	The diversity of programmes is remarkable. I first worked with the British Council on an earthquake recovery programme in Turkey in the 1970s and from 2000 until 2003 with an access to information programme which began in Peru, has now extended to several other countries in South America and has resulted in binding legal agreements and practical local initiatives to ensure that people participate in decisions that affect their lives and livelihoods. A recent US study suggests strongly that non-violent civic forces are a major factor in positive political change, but change initiated by the élite—a top-down democratic change—has little positive effect on democratisation. It is the British Council working with people at the local level and being the interface between what people want in cultural relationships, educational development and the government of that country which is so extraordinarily valuable.
	In the 109 countries in which the British Council works it contributes daily to the UK's international standing and reputation and to the development of civil society. It is hugely experienced in what it does; and its work is a powerful and synergistic combination of development, democracy and debate. We would have to invent it if it did not exist. The British Council, together with one or two other international outreach enterprises such as the BBC World Service, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and a few others, go some way to mitigate the loss of a comprehensive British diplomatic presence around the world.

Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, we all owe a great debt to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe. I hope that we shall hear a lot more of the robust "Patten-speak" which we heard.
	Once upon a time we had a Foreign Office which embraced foreign relations, culture and overseas aid. Diplomats in a long and varied career made friends in the countries in which they served and in other missions. Years later that investment paid off. In the 1950s, our ambassador in Moscow, William Hayter, and the US ambassador, Chip Bohlen, were close friends—a friendship which survived even the impact of Suez. They had been Third Secretaries together in the Soviet Union before the war at the time of the great treason trials. Such friendships have often been made in difficult countries with exotic languages and have given us access to otherwise impenetrable regimes. The British Council and the World Service have also played a most valuable role as part of the political relationship. So, too, did aid.
	When this Government came to power everything changed. When asked his view of British foreign policy, the head of the foreign policy centre set up by the Prime Minister and the new Foreign Secretary said that he was shocked to discover that it was based on the promotion of the national interest. We should not, he said, be talking to political leaders, moreover, but to the grass roots. DfID was created and its Secretary of State thereafter made decisions, notably in Ethiopia, Uganda, the Congo and Zimbabwe with little or no perception of the political consequences. Giving aid was good; and that was enough.
	The Commission for Africa is full of DfID-speak and the Prime Minister's vaunted friends on that body are the Prime Minister of Ethiopia—who has recently been shooting down unarmed civilians who are not voting the right way and gearing up for another war with Eritrea—and President Museveni of Uganda whose desire for a third term has led him to seize and imprison his chief political rival and threaten him with death for treason. According to the DfID profile on Ethiopia, our development assistance of at least £60 million a year over three years is mainly in the form of budget support—that is, a direct grant—
	"in response to the government's clearly stated preference for this form of financial assistance".
	Fortunately the Secretary of State has intervened to suspend further payments in the light of recent events.
	In the DRC the Government have given over £22 million to help with the supervision of elections and £40 million to help rebuild the country—let alone the money given to MONUC—all money down the drain. We should leave it to South Africa, which has major commercial interests there, to help the Congo.
	We are not only helping a number of African countries directly; we also contribute through the EU, the World Bank and, above all, the United Nations with £70 million in the DRC alone this year. In 2004–05, DfID contributed over £330 million and the FCO budget over £217 million to UN agencies. The UN is not noted for its efficient, or sometimes even honest, management of money. Why do we not give more of that money to our own posts to disburse?
	DfID spends a lot of money. Why not? Britain is rich compared to the countries of Africa, for instance. My quarrel is with the disastrous effects of the new order on our knowledge of, and therefore influence in, the world. The FCO has major responsibilities that are now threatened. It is responsible for the safety and well-being of British subjects abroad. That is becoming a more onerous task. DfID cannot get British subjects out of gaol, ensure the safety of a threatened British community in a coup, or rescue a British subject from a forced marriage. The FCO is responsible for the promotion of British economic and defence interests, which requires excellent local contacts and knowledge of the economic and political hazards. Not least, the FCO has a duty to report on the international terrorist threat, whether from Russia's still-undestroyed chemical weapons, which are vulnerable to terrorists, or from Al-Qaeda in Africa. Eritrea, Sudan, Kenya, Somalia and even Malawi have all contributed to the terrorist threat in some way. We cannot cover that by an e-mail from No. 10, yet we have only minute diplomatic posts in those vulnerable countries, while DfID is expanding all over Africa.
	The FCO, which is responsible for reporting on international terrorism, the promotion of Britain's economic and defence interests and the security of British citizens abroad, is being weakened daily by the cutting of posts and resources. Yet, all around Africa—and not only Africa—you will find minute diplomatic posts and large, lavishly staffed, separate DfID offices. In the UN, every country's vote counts, as the Chinese, who are opening up everywhere, well understand. We, however, are wilfully reducing our influence in the name of a short-sighted economic drive. The Treasury has required the FCO to close nine embassies and 21 consulates and to retire 70 experienced diplomats, all to save £6 million per annum in an overall target of £86 million. Last year, the DfID budget for Africa alone was £357 million, and that department had 348 UK-based staff in post.
	The work of the Commission for Africa, if it ever comes to anything, will not be done by closing posts in Africa, or by relying on DfID to assess the political risks or to estimate the political future of a leader such as Museveni. It concerns me that the chief responsibility for advising the Prime Minister on Africa in his strategic unit has gone to a relatively junior DfID representative, to whom all communications on policy from our African posts must go, whose political experience of Africa is probably minimal.
	In a further dilution of the influence on policy of the FCO, I understand that DfID is now to be represented on the JIC. In the recent White Paper, it was truly said that having a post on the ground is the most effective form of diplomatic representation in a country. It is the proper representation of our country, not its philanthropic activity, and I believe it to be vital and at risk. DfID is a valuable entity, but it should be only one of the manifestations of our international policy. So long as the countries we support as donors through DfID perceive DfID missions, which are often quite large, as a separate policy-making entity, completely independent of the usually very small diplomatic mission, the diplomats will not be regarded as the voice of the UK, and they will not have appropriate political access and influence. The DfID mission, which is full of young technical specialists who often neither speak the language nor understand the culture and politics, will be seen as the seat of power and influence. That will rarely be appropriate. Her Majesty's Government should not forget that donors are rarely loved or respected, and are often perceived or represented as colonialist in their approach, whereas diplomatic relations confer dignity and imply equality. In Africa, this is not an issue to be ignored.
	A culture in this Government that fails to value trained professionals as a resource and allows the Treasury to play number games is having disastrous consequences. It is not unknown for a Prime Minister to want to be his own Foreign Minister. In the past, they had the sense to read papers and use a superb professional machine, the Office. God help us if we ever have a Prime Minister who, in addition, regards the Office as just one more expendable, old-fashioned cottage hospital. Skills are not easily replaced.

Lord Goodlad: My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon for giving us the opportunity to discuss this vital topic and congratulate him on his opening speech. I congratulate, too, my noble friend Lord Patten of Barnes on his maiden speech which, in accordance with the traditions of your Lordships' House, was, by his standards, wholly uncontroversial. He and I have shared many adventures in the past, and I hope that we shall share many adventures in this place in years to come. I congratulate him on his personal contribution to our public diplomacy through his books East and West and Not Quite the Diplomat, which I gather are selling in the Asia-Pacific region, if not like hot cakes, certainly like cold tinnies.
	I, too, bring a particular perspective to this debate, having been Minister of State at the Foreign Office responsible for the Foreign Office budget when my noble friend Lord Hurd was Foreign Secretary, and subsequently having been High Commissioner in Australia, in which context, I turned poacher. There was a certain resonance in the expression "management guff" used by my noble friend Lord Patten, but I will not follow him down that route.
	In recent years, the volume and velocity of diplomatic activity has increased enormously. There are now 15 million British citizens living aboard, and 65 million overseas trips are made by British citizens every year. Demands for travel advice and consular, visa and passport services are constantly increasing. The United Kingdom's worldwide interests are pursued through ever more direct contacts between heads of government and senior officials. There is ever more interchange with countries across the range of government activities and ever greater volumes of communication. The role of resident diplomats overseas has been enormously enhanced over the years. Diplomacy has become, as the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, said, a whole of government activity. The communications revolution has broadened our horizons and our opportunities and hugely intensified the pressures on the Diplomatic Service.
	Although, as a nation, we are usually too modest to make vainglorious claims, as the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond said, the British Diplomatic Service is seen by its peers as the best in the world. Many of its members work today in exceptionally difficult and dangerous circumstances, and it is much too easy to take them for granted. Compared with other government departments, the numbers are small. The Diplomatic Service employs, I believe, fewer people than Harrods. As other noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Garel-Jones, have pointed out, the budget is minuscule. Several years ago, I noticed that the ammunition budget for Bosnia was larger than the Foreign Office running costs budget worldwide. In pursuit of our strategic priorities, the FCO has had to become extremely adaptable in shifting resources. More and more tasks are laid on it, and levels of expectation, particularly of the consular service, continue to rise.
	The pressure on resources has gone too far. Opening new posts in the former Soviet Union, developments in Afghanistan and Iraq and other activities have stretched the elastic too tight. The FCO's greatest assets are its people and its network of posts. Yet one in four jobs in the senior management structure is now being cut altogether, eight sovereign and 10 subordinate posts are to be closed in addition to those already closed and a further 11 subordinate posts are to be localised, all to save a mere £6 million. Madagascar, where Rio Tinto is about to make a very substantial investment, is but one example of a seemingly less important country becoming more important in the wake of a post closure decision. Localisation sends a negative signal to the host country. Furthermore, locally engaged staff, however competent, cannot enjoy the same access as that enjoyed by career diplomats. It is also the case that no career structure is open to them, and I have seen able locally engaged people leave almost immediately for more exciting prospects. Localisation is an extremely insidious process.
	I salute the achievement of the Foreign Office in securing money from the Treasury to enhance the security of our overseas posts following the attack in Istanbul, but I fear that while the Foreign Office should examine its resource allocation with the same rigour as everybody else, a constant state of revolution, of continual salami-slicing, will do great damage to our interests.
	Devoting more resources to reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, climate change and energy security is clearly desirable, but it should not be at the expense of other priorities. If we are to continue to pursue a global foreign policy that actually achieves real outcomes I believe that the resources devoted to it should be realistic rather than exiguous, and I hope that this debate will contribute to that process and that outcome.

Baroness Hooper: My Lords, the starting point must be that the Foreign Office and our representatives abroad do a first-class job, one that we have all been justifiably proud of. Those of us who have travelled abroad on ministerial visits, in parliamentary delegations or leading trade missions have experienced this excellence at first hand.
	The perception now, as my noble and learned friend Lord Howe explained so clearly, is that budgetary constraints are taking their toll, jobs are being cut or downgraded and embassies closed, and distinguished diplomats are taking early retirement because the career structure which used to attract the crème de la crème of Civil Service entrants seems to be disappearing. Moreover, the problem is exacerbated because DTI support for trade missions, which was so helpful in encouraging small and medium-sized businesses to seek new markets overseas, has been cut. British Council centres have disappeared and educational exchanges such as the Chevening scholarship programme, which has already been mentioned and is a particularly good and successful example, are suffering reduced finance, high visa costs and other restraints.
	That is happening not only in Latin America, a region in which I take a particular interest, but all over the world. We can all appreciate that, in these days of instant communication, Ministers are also able to travel the world and new embassies and offices have had to be opened in central and eastern Europe, central Asia and elsewhere because of the very welcome ending of the Cold War. Resources are therefore bound to be stretched. Perversely, however, what appears to be happening is that budgets are being cut. I find it incredible and incomprehensible. We must all be grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon for tabling his Motion and introducing the debate in his customary, thorough way. It gives us the opportunity to seek more clarification and to urge for more openness and transparency.
	What is going on? Is it all the fault of the Treasury, as my noble friend Lord Patten, in his splendid maiden speech, suggested? Do the Government prefer to direct resources in directions and to departments over which they may think they have more direct political control, as has also been suggested? Is it intended that the United Kingdom should join our European partners and be represented by European Union embassies in places such as Latin America?
	I am informed that the Foreign Office is moving from a geographic to a more sectoral approach. My Question on 2 November, to which reference has already been made, provoked a supplementary from the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, in which he asked the Minister to put something on the website or to place a note in the Library to explain these changes. It would be helpful if the Minister would let us know whether that has happened.
	I recently entered into correspondence with the Foreign Secretary at the instigation of a British individual living abroad who suggested that an international corps of Foreign Office volunteers should be established, composed mainly of expatriate Brits who could support embassies, particularly in cultural and social fields. The suggestion has received an extremely polite but not very encouraging response. But it shows what a pass we are in if people living abroad feel it necessary to, as it were, subsidise the Foreign Office in its activities.
	Nevertheless, in referring to the idea of voluntary support for our embassies, we should recognise the very valuable help and support given by organisations such as the English Speaking Union. It should also be said that the honorary consuls and consular wardens now appointed at certain overseas posts are doing an excellent job. I can vouch for that on a personal basis as I was in Paraguay in August. The British embassy there was closed in July. Incidentally, our ambassador in Buenos Aires, who has been appointed to cover Paraguay as well as Argentina, has not only not been given additional resources to do so but has in fact had his staff and budget cut.
	I am straying from the point that I wanted to make, which is that the honorary British consul in Asuncion, who is a Paraguayan of Italian and Spanish descent, is doing an important job together with the voluntary British-Paraguayan chamber of commerce in keeping the British flag flying. Fortunately, my noble friend Lord Garel-Jones has made more extensive references to Latin America and the historic links and goodwill which exist there for the United Kingdom than time permits me to do. I therefore look forward to hearing the Minister's reply and trust that he appreciates that most of the accusations for stinginess are being directed at the Treasury and not at the hard-pressed Foreign Office.

Lord Harrison: My Lords, there is a variety of ways in which we can promote British interests—often by a small infusion of funds for very considerable dividends. I shall speak about five areas.
	The Diplomatic Service has featured first of all. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, whom we all thank for introducing the debate, has spoken knowledgeably and feelingly on this matter. I, too, worry about the loss or diminution of missions in Brisbane and the Bahamas—the old and new Commonwealth—and in Madagascar where francophonie is in recession and the English language is on the rise. Why do we not recognise the strength of the English language and exploit it for our purposes? Miami is the gateway to the Caribbean and Central America. Bordeaux is the home town of 24,000 Britons who are domiciled in the Dordogne. Frankfurt is the home of the European Central Bank and a rival financial capital to London. We should be there on the qui vive for what is happening.
	I understand the Government's laudable desire to get the best value for money, but I have offered an alternative in this House before—an alternative route of collocation of embassies. Perhaps that could be with the USA, where the priority is for security purposes, or with our partners in the European Union, which is already happening and where the proper allocation of duties can be achieved to ensure that we and our own British embassies are more effective.
	Secondly, I refer to the established institutions for promoting British culture and the English language. The noble Lord, Lord Patten, whom we warmly welcome to this House, spoke about the BBC World Service, and the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, talked about the British Council, run by the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock. We celebrate the work of the British Council. However, in the 10 years that I spent abroad, I was very conscious that there were other well-funded institutions of the same ilk such as the Goethe Institute and the Friedrich Stiftung Institute, which very effectively promote German interests and culture. Good luck to them, but we should be doing the same. We should approach institutions like the BBC and the British Council in a businesslike way. After all, those who learn English buy British.
	Thirdly, another British success is higher education and overseas students. A recent House of Lords report has, however, demonstrated that Britain has fallen to third place as the desirable destination for EU students wanting a higher education place, behind both France and Spain, homes to two other classic diplomatic languages. We should be trying to help and promote the strength of higher education and initiatives such as that which my own university, the University of Warwick, is establishing at a campus in Hong Kong.
	Fourthly, inbound tourism has been served well by the Government. Broadly speaking, tourism does not find favour with politicians. It should, however, because it has a vital role in promoting the United Kingdom and spreading British culture. The recent criticisms of the noble Lord, Lord Marshall, on the plurality of funding within the UK need to be properly addressed. We need a sharper, well-aimed strategy that is aimed at ruthlessly promoting Britain and the opportunities here.
	Fifthly, I turn to support for sport. Who can doubt the diplomacy shown by the noble Lord, Lord Coe, and our own Prime Minister in securing the Olympics for London? We now aspire also to gain a football World Cup. Those will not only bring people to Britain but take British ambassadors abroad under the auspices of sport. But we are very poor at recognising other areas of interest where we can use British ambassadors for our purpose. Although there are many examples I shall give just one from the world of chess. After all, London established the first-ever international chess tournament at the same time as the Great Exhibition in 1851. Hastings later became the most established annual tournament for international chess players in the world. In 1895, the American, Harry Nelson Pillsbury, was supreme over all his continental opponents of that time. Now, we are in a very sorry state of affairs. I cannot remember the last time that there was an international tournament in London. Hastings is now a second-rate or perhaps a third-rate tournament.
	I point that out to the Minister because I hope he will embrace other areas than the Diplomatic Service, and recognise that we require a thought-out strategy on how to promote United Kingdom interests and that a little funding will go a long way in helping the myriad British ambassadors who go out and speak up on our behalf and whom we welcome in our ranks.

Lord Selsdon: My Lords, I should confess that when I was a relatively young man I had an ambition to join the Foreign Office. My real ambition was to be Foreign Secretary. I was serving in the British fleet in the Mediterranean just after Suez when we were told that we were going to wave the flag in the Arab world. We went to Beirut where I learnt to water ski. I met John Julius Norwich, the third secretary—I was below third secretary level—and asked him what it was like in the Foreign Office. He said, "My dear chap, if I were you I wouldn't join a declining industry". I said, "Why?". He said, "Communication: we used to have a relatively free hand because no one from the office in London could get in touch with us and, of course, there were not many aeroplanes. But it will decline and the Treasury will always say that there's no money necessary".
	One of my prized possessions, that I was given by the Ministry of Transport, was a map of the world showing where His Majesty's ships were at sea 14 days after my birth in 1937. As your Lordships will know, the map was mainly red. I also learnt that if you had a British flagged vessel—I declare an interest as treasurer and secretary of the House of Lords Yacht Club in this Trafalgar year—you had certain rights and obligations. If you flew a British flag you could call on the assistance of His or Her Majesty's ambassadors, consuls, proconsuls, plenipotentiaries and others wheresoever they might be. Sadly, there are fewer today, as there are fewer British flagged vessels. However, it taught me that everyone thought of the Foreign Office.
	As usual, my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon, with his delightful, gentle touch, with a bit of steel behind it, drafted a very wide brief. But the brief, until the intervention of the noble Lords, Lord Haskel and Lord Harrison, has in general concentrated on the Foreign Office and not on all those other issues. With my map, I set out to say "Where in the world should one do things?". I moved into the banking world. At Midland Bank, we had active bank accounts with more than 10,000 banks around the world and, effectively, had our own foreign service. When I was on the credit committee, we had certain rules. We could not lend to any country unless we had "been there", which meant that you had to have been there within the previous three months. You had to know the country and the people concerned, and its bankers were trained at our training school in Haslemere. We would build quite a surprising international relationship.
	Recently, I learnt that the Foreign Office may be selling off embassies in order to pay for information technology, which will be outdated within weeks or perhaps days, whereas embassies and their locations in prime parts of the world are not. It may seek to raise private money, such as the private finance initiative on the British embassy in Berlin, because it could not recognise that our property assets in the world have risen year on year to outstanding values.
	I am not being critical, but I come to an area in which the United Kingdom is possibly the most advanced in the world. Your Lordships will be aware that the Government sell mobile telephone licences for often twice the annual cost of the Foreign Office budget, but they do not give any of that money to the Foreign Office. In this world of information technology and mobile telephones, the world is smaller than it ever has been. We are in a position to use that technology to our benefit in communication and information. We talk about an information technology base and a knowledge base.
	One of my fears is that as this information wends its way through different links into the United Kingdom, those who have not been there interpret it in the wrong way. I apply that in particular to Ministers and governments of all parties who make judgments and worldwide decisions based on information about countries to which they have never been. I refer inevitably to one of my favourite countries. I should explain that I chair a body which is trying to promote the culture and history of Iraq, Babylon and so forth—when I saw the noble Lord, Lord Winston, I was grateful to him for his own initiatives—on which a major decision was made by people who in general had not been to that country. I took the opportunity to look up all noble Lords who have spoken in Iraq debates in recent years and found that in almost every debate fewer than 5 per cent had been there. They had not even "been there, done it and got the T-shirt".
	I turn now to what we should be representing, and to the text of my noble and learned friend's Motion. Your Lordships will be aware that more than 80 per cent of British people have passports. Further, there are 13 million British people living abroad. If we look to some of our former obligations, your Lordships will be aware that the Commonwealth has, including our population, about 29 per cent of the population of the world. We have greater opportunities and, perhaps, obligations than ever before. But we have the advantage of our knowledge base and technical communications. We also have the advantage that through the United Kingdom moves probably the greatest volume of international investment of all time. It may not be our money. It may be that awful mnemonic OPM—other people's money—but we have some influence on it and we are a force for good in the world.
	I turn back to my map and I realise that we still have worldwide opportunities. I wonder why our empire was built farther away from home and that hardly anyone in the new countries of the EU speaks English as a first language.

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville: My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Selsdon. It is one of his distinctions that he always speaks in your Lordships' House with great fluency and punctuality, as he did today, but equally without ever having the benefit of a note. Amnesiacs like myself can envy but not emulate him.
	My noble and learned friend, Lord Howe of Aberavon, was, as he said, for over a decade successively Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary, the ideal hinterland for the debate which he has initiated, and with such breadth as to encourage a plethora of other speakers, not least and notably, my noble friend Lord Patten of Barnes, whose hinterland has a similar kaleidoscopic quality.
	In a debate like this, if you bat 17th, everything that could be said has been said at least once much earlier in the debate, so I shall necessarily be more idiosyncratic. If I have a text at all, it is the opening words of my own first passport which, as I recall started:
	"We, Ernest Bevin, His Britannic Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, requests and requires in the name of His Majesty . . . ".
	Many in your Lordships' House will be familiar with the story told in James and Jan Morris's great imperial trilogy, of the outpost in Sudan which heliographed to Khartoum:
	"Outpost surrounded by lions and tigers. Please advise".
	To which Khartoum, with the classic British concentration on the essential, replied:
	"There are no tigers in Africa",
	prompting the outpost to reply:
	"Delete tigers".
	Yet we all know that lions and tigers roam the world, and it is not in the British character to ask others to control their behaviour on our behalf. Our island topography has never made for insularity of conduct or mien. Before the days of empire, the Muscovy Company was founded in 1555, the Turkey Company in 1581, the Venice Company in 1583—the latter two merging in 1592 to become the Levant Company—the East India Company in 1600, and the Virginia Company in 1609. It was an Elizabethan and Jacobean version of globalisation. Sir Thomas Gresham, of Gresham's law and probably the richest commoner in England, was inter alia the Crown's financial agent in Antwerp. One of the companies I mentioned ran its finances from the City of London but ran its global trading operations from the Low Countries.
	To fast-forward within the Low Countries, as one is obliged to do in these soundbite times, I was in business in Brussels at the time Heath government—of which my noble and learned friend Lord Howe was a distinguished member—was negotiating our EEC entry. Being in business, I was on the road throughout Europe during the week, but back in Brussels at the weekend where, socially, I was constantly struck that the international staffs of multinational companies headquartering regionally in Brussels were largely composed, perhaps for linguistic reasons, of men and women from the smaller European countries, but that the British outnumbered all others put together from the larger European countries. We have an international aptitude and, despite perfidious Albion, we are strangely trusted.
	Dean Acheson's quip that we had lost an empire but failed to find a role has perhaps been overtaken. In the words of Tennyson's Ulysses:
	"We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are".
	The new role is not a formal one, as perhaps befits a nation shaped before global warming by centuries of mist. Informally, we have become special constables to the world. The United Nations always seeks a British contribution to any new peacekeeping venture. It does this not only because of our military competence, but also because of our capacity to rub along and to work with others.
	I appreciate that the Prime Minister's taking up of the Messianic inheritance of the Gladstonian Liberals a century and a quarter ago acknowledged the Tennysonian disclaimer I quoted. There is a continuity of attitude about the problem. Gladstone's rationalisation of the military occupation of Egypt in 1881 and taking arms against the Dervishes of the Sudan thereafter was akin to part of Her Majesty's Government's explanations of why we are in Iraq. Nor do I in any way denigrate the present Chancellor of the Exchequer's expansion of British international aid, especially to Africa, on which my noble and learned friend Lord Howe made comparative comment. Yet, in the long history which has given us our particular international centrality, and which was characterised by the recent debate my noble friend Lord Freeman initiated on the Commonwealth, it was both the public and the private sector which worked in integrated tandem, sometimes trade following the flag, sometimes vice versa. One cannot help remarking, at this moment when domestically the West Lothian question is still unanswered but internationally the Achesonian one seems on the way to resolution, that the Treasury is diminishing in proportionate terms the resources, both military and civilian, to sustain the new mission that the Prime Minister has bestowed on those who carry the freight and responsibility to deliver it.
	I began with Khartoum, and will end between Afghanistan and Iraq. Some in your Lordships' House will recall Colonel Bailey's book Mission to Tashkent. Bailey, Britain's principal agent on the Northwest Frontier in 1914, because of his mastery of Muslim dialects and of disguise, was, in the aftermath of the 1918 war, the senior staff officer from the Indian Government attached to the White Russians in central Asia. Bailey, who died peacefully in his own bed in Norfolk in the 1960s, achieved his professional apogee by attaching himself to the Bolshevik NKVD murder squad, whose only duty was to hunt down and destroy the notorious British spy, Colonel Bailey.
	There can be no substitute through technology for such individuals as Colonel Bailey. Individuals will always be individuals, but they are persons rather than machines, and often in distant places. Their spirits require refreshment and material encouragement from Her Majesty's Government for their services' services. We at home whom they also serve through the 21st century equivalent of that magical instruction, "We, Ernest Bevin . . . " which I quoted earlier, owe them the sense that what they do is both important and valuable to us, and need to insist to our rulers that we at least recognise that this reassurance does not, and should not, come cheap.

Viscount Eccles: My Lords, I need to go carefully; I cannot match the elegance of my noble friend Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville. My noble and learned friend Lord Howe was, for a while, my ultimate boss, and though they are not now in their places, there have been two of my semi-ultimate bosses in the House today: my noble friend Lady Chalker of Wallasey, and my noble friend Lord Patten of Barnes. Since they are not here, but my noble and learned friend Lord Howe is, I will repeat a conviction I have had for many years: £1 spent on the Foreign Office is worth £2 spent on DfID.
	In considering resources, there will be general agreement that it is in British interests that the developing world, country by country, achieves that degree of economic development to bring it into the developed world, and that Britain is right to commit resources to the endeavour. Some countries successfully attracting foreign investment—a precondition of success for most—will get there by themselves, as did Japan and Singapore, and as will China and probably India. Many countries with less obvious economic opportunities—some beset by that description of market failure, so familiar to bureaucracy—need positive action by others.
	At present, we concentrate on the easy and historically less effective options of debt relief and aid. These were not the roads to the economic performance of the United States, Bismarck's Germany, or ourselves—not forgetting the exceptional circumstances of the Marshall Plan. Aid has a role to play, but it is a limited role and more a matter of necessary alleviation than a sustainable solution. Trade is much more significant than aid, but not an easy option for developing countries, for where is the leverage in the cut and thrust of the marketplace? We might look at what lies behind the current negotiations on bananas and sugar.
	Finally, there is investment. Creative investment in the producers of goods and services was our way out of poverty, as defined by the World Bank today. Why should it be different for developing countries? However, investment does not feature highly, or at all optimistically, on the Government's agenda—certainly not if we take the Africa commission's report as a guide. Yet, in 1948–49, the then government set up the Colonial Development Corporation.
	I was with CDC, by then the Commonwealth Development Corporation, and that was when my noble and learned friend was my ultimate boss. Indeed, he once stopped me in my tracks by saying that he did not need a lecture on the constitution. Mind you, the point I was making was correct, but it did not happen to be in the Foreign Secretary's brief, and, as is the way with Ministers who are lawyers, he knew how to defend himself.
	Where is CDC now, though? It has dropped "development" from its name. We do not hear of it. It lies low because of a failed government policy towards it. One suspects that the Government—at least, the Chancellor and the Treasury—would gladly be rid of it. Perhaps the Minister will be able to tell us whether Her Majesty's Government consider that CDC is a significant resource in support of British interests overseas and to be nurtured; indeed, whether they have a policy towards CDC, or are simply leaving it to fend for itself under a false label of "independence".
	In pursuing the road to economic success, we can list countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand. They needed three primary resources. First was equity capital: capital that is willing to wait for its return, often at lower levels than those obtainable in western silicon valleys. In many countries, domestic savings will be insufficient. Foreign capital will be vital, and British equity needs to play its part.
	The second resource is people. Where equity is invested, particularly in start-ups, an arm's-length relationship will be unsatisfactory. Partnership is needed, along with skilled people. Thirdly, Her Majesty's Government need to be present on the ground to provide a continuity of relationship—as has been referred to several times in this debate—with developing-country governments. We are in the endeavour for the long term, and agreements will be needed to reinforce the prospects of economic success in places where legal systems lack certainty on contract, tenure, employment, tax, exchange controls and many other matters; for example, work permits for partners.
	If we are serious about our contribution to development, particularly that of Africa, we will redefine and change our policy towards the deployment of British resources. Our present analysis and programme lack both depth and credibility. Indeed, if we just wait until all the capacity-building that can be achieved proves both expensive and insufficient for economic success, as it has and will, and at the same time chip away at the cost of being present on the ground, we shall fail to serve both our own best interests and those of the developing world.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, listening to this debate brought back to me memories of when I was just starting out as a young academic nearly 40 years ago and decided that I would work on foreign policy-making in Britain. In the 1960s, as the noble Lord, Lord Wright, will remember, there were two government inquiries into the future of British interests abroad, which led to the merging of the Commonwealth Relations Office and the Colonial Office into the Foreign Office, leaving behind various orphans like the Commonwealth Development Corporation. The Duncan review in particular caused a great furore by describing Britain as,
	"a major power of the second rank".
	It was vigorously attacked by the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and others for suggesting that Britain was not a first-rank superpower.
	When my book was published in 1976, the Central Policy Review Staff was just setting out on another review. I have a vivid memory of being carpeted when trying to visit junior staff at the British Embassy in Paris by the then ambassador, Sir Nicholas Henderson, who grilled me aggressively about my book. Only afterwards did I realise that he was sharpening his teeth for the visit the following week by the woman whom the Daily Mail described as the "dark-eyed evil genius" of the CPRS review—better known to your Lordships, of course, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone.
	The Berrill report's recommendations included that there should be an overseas budget that pulled together the Foreign Office, development and Ministry of Defence budgets, as well as an external service recruited not as a diplomatic service, but from several departments across Whitehall engaged in external activities and feeding back into the whole of Whitehall. It made a number of arguments in recommending this: the need for wider language skills around Whitehall; the desirability of our representatives abroad being more deeply rooted in British government and society than some of our diplomats who spent two-thirds of their careers abroad were able to be; and the growing reluctance of both women and men with families to accept overseas postings when their children were small.
	Thirty years later these trends are far more evident than they were then. Foreign policy is conducted by much of Whitehall. Many people have mentioned this. I am struck by the complete transformation of the Home Office over the past 20 years from a department where there was an instinctive suspicion of foreigners coming into the building, to one that at last count had 70 people working full-time on international and European matters, most of whom speak two or three languages apart from English. The same is true of Defra, as has been pointed out, as well as those departments like the DTI and the Treasury which have always had large international activities.
	Foreign policy has not only spread across Whitehall, but has been increasingly concentrated in No. 10. I would underline what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, was saying more tactfully, which is that, to some extent, the Foreign Office has been sidelined in British foreign and European policy by the extent to which policy is now concentrated with the Prime Minister and his advisers in No. 10. Alongside that, in the developed world, embassies are often bypassed by Ministers conducting direct relations—and of course by the Prime Minister, as Sir Christopher Meyer has so famously complained.
	There are many Britons abroad, and many more foreign citizens in Britain. We have a much greater degree of economic interdependence within the global economy, and, as many noble Lords have remarked, there has been a sharp and continuing increase in the number of states that are now members of the United Nations. I was reading the evidence given to the Foreign Affairs Committee in another place before this debate, and I noticed a complaint that we were not yet represented in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. We have only six representations in the former Yugoslavia so far. We used to manage with Belgrade alone. I am not quite sure how important Montenegro will be as an independent state immediately, but if it is going to be a member of the European Union in 15 years' time, sure enough, we will need to be represented there. One recognises that as the number of independent states grows, we simply cannot cover all of them.
	There has been one major change in our security context with the end of the Cold War. That is the disappearance of any direct threat to the United Kingdom from any other state and the replacement of that direct threat with threats that are much more indirect, through terrorism and state collapse in distant continents, and through the surges of asylum seekers that state collapse in Somalia—or, in previous years, the situation of the Kurds in Iraq—brings to this country. One has to remark that there has been only a partial adjustment to the transformation of our security context. My noble friend Lord Garden talked about the growth of defence diplomacy and the commitment to nation building, essentially a cross-departmental activity. However, as he also remarked, if you look at our procurement and our balance of forces you will see that we are still divided in exactly what we are trying to do with our defence commitment. I have started to read Sir Rupert Smith's The Utility of Force, in which he says with very considerable power that the balance of British defence procurement and commitments simply does not meet the different sorts of threats and tasks that we now face.
	What should be the direction of change? First, we need a clearer sense of what our objectives are and what we think our role is, as the Duncan review said all those many years ago. If we intend to continue to punch above our weight, who do we think we are punching and what are we punching for? Are we primarily the junior partner of the United States or a partner in exerting growing European influence on the global order? That of course is the central problem for our military: whether we intend it to continue to be able to operate alongside the United States in major operations, or to shift its balance to the more likely new tasks. One may remark that of course the United States military has failed extremely badly to shift towards these new tasks of nation-building, police operation and defence diplomacy, in which the British Army has gained so many skills.
	Secondly, we clearly should be moving towards an overseas budget—a cross-departmental budget—in which one can talk about what is spent on defence against what is spent on development and on representation. We recognise that the Ministry of Defence will resist. It is easier to see how one might rationalise relations and representations between DfID and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the developing world, as the French have done more carefully than we have.
	Thirdly, I also support the idea of an overseas service in which people would spend more of their careers in different departments, and less in just the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. That would encourage a closer integration of the FCO into Whitehall, with overseas missions drawn from across Whitehall. This is partly happening. I have been struck when visiting embassies across the European Union by how often one meets people from the Home Office or from Customs and Excise and so on; it is a development that we should be encouraging.
	Fourthly, we need a continued emphasis on public diplomacy—the British Council and the BBC, for example. I support strongly what the noble Lord, Lord Patten, has said about the shameful toadying to Rupert Murdoch on the question of the future of the BBC's global operations. We should also continue to support those quasi-governmental agencies and non-governmental organisations that engage in what the Asians call second-track diplomacy—bilateral conferences and various other bodies of which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, has spoken.
	Lastly, we should share resources abroad. It is highly unlikely that we are going to move towards common European embassies during our lifetimes. However, sharing consular services, reporting, counter-terrorism work, the provision of security and transport co-location are all highly desirable. Indeed they are already happening in a number of third-country missions. Last year I was in Reykjavik where the British and the Germans shared a building, a conference room and a transport pool, but otherwise operated separately; a useful saving of money without blurring too far that we are representing different states.
	The Government would do better to admit publicly what they are doing in this respect and in others. I am struck by the extent to which British forces are now engaged in a range of joint European peacekeeping activities in Aceh and Gaza, and shortly also perhaps in Transnistria, Moldova. There are other operations, such as the new agreement being negotiated between the African Union and European Union about which nothing is being reported to Parliament, almost as if the Government are ashamed of what is happening. That of course is part of the confusion over foreign-policy objectives, strategy role and presentation at home. The first essential is therefore a clearer definition of Britain's international strategy and role. The second is a clearer co-ordination of policy-making and policy management between an over-powerful No. 10, an undervalued Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and its partners in the Ministry of Defence and DfID and the rest of Whitehall.

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, it has been a real pleasure to listen to this debate this afternoon. We are all extremely grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Howe for introducing the subject and speaking from his vast and almost unique experience in these fields. I was also delighted to hear the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Patten of Barnes. What particularly pleased me more than I am normally pleased by his excellent delivery and style of speaking was his candour about the Treasury, whose expensive ignorance in cutting budgets time and again leads to even more expensive consequences as we have all learnt to our cost.
	At the risk of striking a slightly discordant note, there has emerged from the comments of your Lordships over the past two and a half hours a clear message for the Government which I hope the Minister will take back to his colleagues. It is worrying to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, who was a central Minister in the Foreign Office and a really excellent Minister as well, saying that diplomatic initiatives and diplomatic budgets are being under-resourced and squeezed. Moreover, she was not the only person to say it—a lot of people said it in the debate. It is worrying to hear my noble and learned friend Lord Howe, with all his experience, pointing to the minuscule resources assigned to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the minuscule resources available for diplomacy and its associated skills compared with the tens of billions spent on defence projects such as the Eurofighter. There are no doubt similar projects to come, some of which have dubious value in protecting the lives of our citizens in the streets of London. Indeed they appear to have no connection with that vital task at all.
	In the debate there has also been a cautious challenge, which I welcome as it I believe it is very healthy, to that almost unchallengeable shibboleth that spending more money on aid is a good thing because it leads to more development. We are of course beginning to learn that aid does not necessarily equal development and therefore, as my noble friend Lord Eccles rightly said, maybe a couple of pounds on aid might be better spent in another way. I am not trying to claim that everything that is done by our great diplomats is essential. I was reminded when I heard the comments of my noble friend Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville about Khartoum of the reply which was sent to demands from our post in Ulaanbaatar at the time of the Profumo scandal, who wanted every salacious detail sent out in telegrams and received the rather curt reply from London, "We think you have all you need".
	My noble and learned friend Lord Howe mentioned the UK International Priorities document issued by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office two years ago. This document had eight strategic priorities which I re-read last night. Although I was in a generous mood I could not see that more than two of them had achieved the slightest visible progress in the past two years. I then went on to the specific aims in each section, of which there are 62. Again I counted them up and again in a thoroughly generous spirit I found that 17 of the 62 can, with a bit of friendly interpretation, be said to have been achieved; of 13 one really could not say anything because they were so general; and 30 of the specific aims have ended since then in complete and utter failure.
	The latter category includes: zero progress, indeed reversal, on strengthening the European Union; zero progress on UN reform; a move backwards on ending poppy cultivation in Afghanistan; not much progress on halting Iran's nuclear ambitions, all of which issues are mentioned in the strategy report; little progress on the New Partnership for Africa's Development, which, with the Zimbabwe fiasco, has gone backwards; zero progress on agreeing and ratifying an EU constitutional treaty, which, I am afraid, has come to an end; and little progress on reforming and liberalising the EU economies, successful negotiations in the WTO, on which we keep our fingers crossed, strengthening NATO, maintaining energy security or a host of other negatives. Frankly, it has not been a very good record. Failure in all those areas, capped by the alienation in the EU budget debate of most of our friends in central Europe, who used to be our number one supporters—the more I see this saga, the more appalling a development it seems—are costing the British people dearly. A weak Britain in the world leads to weak social cohesion at home, for which we will also pay dearly.
	Worse still, those failures mean that we are squandering golden opportunities to strengthen Britain's reach and influence worldwide. At a time when we should be building up that vital soft-power impact on the world—and, incidentally, when regrettably but realistically American soft-power influence has almost totally collapsed in the world—and when we should be drawing on our immense experience and on the domination of the information revolution by the English language, we seem instead intent on running down our diplomatic capacities and capabilities and sliding, as my noble friend Lord Garel-Jones said very graphically, into the second division or league.
	Who do we call to account for all those undoubtedly damaging setbacks? Is it just the Treasury, which has received a battering from all noble Lords during this debate? Of course it is not just the Treasury. The real answer is that our very hard-working officials, often working in extremely dangerous conditions, and our diplomats and civil servants generally, have been undermined and let down at many points by bad political leadership and wrong-headed or weak foreign policy formulation.
	If asked to specify, I would give three examples. First, Ministers have been preaching, and remain wedded to, the wrong vision about Britain's status, place in the world and potential. We are not just one small to medium-sized European state, caught between trying to please America and trying to be at the heart of Europe. We are a central part of a network of relationships that goes far beyond the European region and is much more than a subordinate partner of the United States. That is one difficulty under which our officials have been labouring. Secondly, because our European policy is feeble and reactive, as demonstrated by the hopeless presidency of the past few months, we have a wrong view of our place in the EU, which has led to neglecting our true friends and allies in this transformed world. Thirdly, if we need, as we do, to establish a friendly but influential dialogue with the USA and have real influence over American policy, we would do far better to work with our real allies around the world, including our fellow Commonwealth members, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, reminded us. That group includes most of the dynamic, knowledge-intensive economies on Earth, such as India, Australasia, Singapore, Malaysia, and so on.
	What are we doing to build up links in that new situation? As we have heard in this debate, we are closing embassies, relocating posts, reducing reach, de-layering and de-prioritising, as my noble friend reminds us, squeezing the Foreign and Commonwealth Office budget—after 2006, in real terms it falls—neglecting our friends outside Europe and weakening Britain's soft power on every side. I hope that no one would question the dedication of our diplomatic staff around the world, both UK-based and local, who work often in conditions of great danger. No one should question the excellent work of the BBC World Service, which should be supported, and the British Council in spreading and promoting the British word and values. But behind all those endeavours should lie "a certain idea", if I may quote General de Gaulle: a certain idea of Britain and its potential in a highly interdependent world. That idea, I regret to say, seems absent from present ruling circles. It should be restored, and with it will come an uplifted morale and pride and new vigour in our diplomatic ranks and in our projection of British policy and influence.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, has chosen to raise an important subject for today's debate, for which I thank him. It has attracted contributions from a distinguished range of Peers. With his barrister's eye for the key points, he has chosen the issue of the FCO's resources and the promotion of the UK's global interests. It is right that the FCO's resources should not be considered in isolation but rather against how best to deliver the outcomes and priorities that it has been set.
	In response to the noble Lord, Lord Garel-Jones, and others, we have and will continue to have a global foreign policy. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Park, that it is bound to be about pursuing the UK's national interests, if there is any doubt about that matter. But as the G8 and others have shown in the past year, the eradication of poverty is one of our interests—not the only one—and I do not know whether we are assisted enormously by having reruns today of the debate on whether the FCO and whatever we call the Department for International Development should be one or more than one department.
	I thank all noble Lords for the extraordinary range of experiences that they have shared; it has been quite humbling for me. I join the congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Patten, on a fine maiden speech, based on his formidable international experience. I have also read Not Quite a Diplomat, which I commend, if advertising on that level is allowed in your Lordships' House. It was of course an uncontroversial speech. In trying to avoid controversy he has focused attention on whether we are doing the right things and whether we are obsessed with managerialism. In that context, I say to the noble Lords, Lord Goodlad and Lord Patten, that good management is not a bad objective. I do not think that any of us would want to disparage it. I am afraid that when people read the language of management it is more often disparaged than achieved. Our ambassadors manage many services and we want them to do it well. Visa services, security services and consulates—I shall not go through the list—must be managed well.
	The noble Lord, Lord Howell, has encouraged me to send the central message, as he sees it, that billions of pounds have been spent that could be more effectively spent elsewhere. He used the example of the MoD. I want to get into that argument a little later. But I say now, particularly since MoD money was talked about, that I look forward to hearing the proposals for the cuts in the MoD budget that would make available the kind of cash it is suggested should be spent in the FCO, and to seeing how popular those arguments are in your Lordships' House.
	There have been three spending reviews since the Government came to office. Both the 2000 and 2002 spending reviews delivered additional resources to the FCO. That trend continued in the 2004 spending review, which resulted in a budget for the FCO that will be £188 million higher in 2007–08 than it was in 2004–05. That is an increase in real terms of 1.4 per cent a year over the period of the spending review. Overall the FCO's budget has increased, as my noble friend Lord Truscott said, by £143 million in real terms since 1999–2000 and by 25 per cent in real terms since 1997. My noble friend Lord Truscott was right to say that there was no crisis. Of course, more resources would always be very helpful. The noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, made the point that the budget has not been cut and nor are we in the situation that she feared of moving from having embassies of our own to having European Union embassy styles of management. I cannot imagine that—

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, I know it is tedious for your Lordships to go into detailed statistics but it is important to be clear about what is happening to the FCO budget. It appears from table 10 in appendix A of the FCO departmental report, 2004–05, that the FCO's resource budget will peak in 2005–06 at £1,813 million and is set to drop off to £1,721 million in 2007–08, which is lower. I do not see how that squares with what the Minister is saying.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, I specifically talked about figures from spending reviews up to this point. There are questions about the future level of budget—the ones to which the noble Lord has just referred—and we are about to enter a new and, I hope, dynamic negotiation with the Treasury on the next comprehensive spending review. That negotiation will be fiercely fought.
	Like all other departments, the 2004 spending review set the FCO challenging efficiency targets of 2.5 per cent in each of the three years of the review period. However, it must be emphasised that the savings generated by these efficiency measures would all be retained by the FCO for its own use. The FCO is deploying these new resources, both those granted in the 2004 spending review and those generated through internal efficiencies, on key priorities, including increasing engagement with and understanding of the Islamic world as well as counter-terrorism, climate change and energy issues. Expenditure in these areas will increase by £15.6 million from 2003–04 levels.
	They are big figures and there are real projects at the heart of them. I mention one by way of illustration—the agreement between the Anglican Communion and the Al-Azhar University in Cairo to exchange scholars to help improve understanding of the teaching of different religions and to promote tolerance. Behind the big figures are real stories. As I said, this additional expenditure has been possible only because of the FCO's efficiency programme, which will deliver £86.7 million of cashable and non-cashable efficiency savings by 2007–08. This will achieved by a number of measures including better purchasing, improved use of capital assets, efficiencies through improvements in the FCO's IT infrastructure and reductions in the number of staff in London working on human resources and finance.
	As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said, it is certainly true that globalised environments make it very much more important to get co-operation across departments in the delivery of foreign policy, just as it is important for those departments to have an FCO input into it. I do not think it is true, though, that the FCO is out of the loop of these major discussions because No. 10 has become a significant player. Of course, some ambassadors and some individuals may believe themselves to be significantly cleverer than the person elected to be the Prime Minister. They may resent the fact that on occasions Prime Ministers may talk directly to presidents without their constant mediation.
	A very high priority for the FCO is the security and protection of its own staff, both UK-based and those recruited overseas. This is both a duty of care for the Foreign Office and a requirement if it is to be able to deliver on UK interests throughout the world. The Foreign Office will spend £50 million more on security in each of the next two years. In my judgment Istanbul taught us a very stark lesson. Candidly, no FCO Minister and—dare I say it?—no Member of this House would rest comfortably unless they felt that every effort had been made to protect those who work for us and represent us in some very dangerous places.
	As regards defence diplomacy and the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Garden, co-operation with the MoD is vital. Training teams need to be in place for long periods. In the Kofi Annan Training Centre in Accra—a training centre for the peace-keeping missions in Africa—exceptional British and African officers are working together. The noble Lord, Lord Wright, also described the need for FCO and MoD co-operation, which I fully endorse.
	Public diplomacy was mentioned by, among others, the noble Lords, Lord Patten and Lord Truscott, the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe. The 2004 spending review included increased resources for the British Council and the BBC World Service to enable them to expand their activities. The BBC World Service will receive £239 million this year from the Government, up from £225 million last year. The figure is set to rise again in 2007–08 to £252 million. The British Council's resources will increase from £172 million to £193 million in 2007–08. Those institutions are widely admired and regarded as giving high value to the United Kingdom. Like the FCO, both of them are required to deliver a 2.5 per cent efficiency saving each year and, like the FCO, they are able to use all the resources released for their own activities. I hope noble Lords will accept that both are capable of demonstrating that they can do better and demanding that of themselves. They both do an extraordinary job but, like every other institution, they can do better. I doubt that either finds it helpful if they are described as being close to perfection. Of course, they can learn from the Goethe Institute and others. Indeed, the Goethe Institute and American institutes overseas are keen to learn from the British Council.
	There has been a decision to reduce the number of vernacular radio services. That makes sense. We have debated these matters in your Lordships' House before. The end of the Cold War, EU accession and NATO membership all add up to living in a different world. The map of the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon—if I may refer to it that way—is an interesting map, but it is a map of a world in which we no longer live, as I am sure he would acknowledge. The new world is often charted out by commercial interests and it is a highly networked world. The BBC World Service is one of the key networks in that highly networked world. I hope I draw on one of the themes that the noble Lord introduced.

Lord Selsdon: My Lords, I may live in the past but my grandfather, who was Postmaster General, gave the BBC its original charter and was responsible for the introduction of the World Service. So things that were good in the past can still be good in the future.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, I entirely agree with that. The values of the past do not die although how we deliver them changes. I believe that the World Service's review was thorough and authoritative, that the right decisions were taken and that they should be seen as part of an investment to meet the requirements of the new world. The Foreign Secretary gave his consent to that change.
	As noble Lords have said, there is an increasing demand for FCO consular and visa issuing services. The funding arrangements for these are different from those of the rest of the FCO. They are funded so that the visa fees recover the full cost of issuing visas. Similarly, consular services are funded through a levy on passports issued at home and overseas. The Treasury holds a reserve to meet catastrophes which hit consular costs in unforeseen ways, as the tsunami did. I am very determined that however unforeseen, monumental or unprecedented a disaster, UK citizens can feel confident of our consular service. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, has had to leave the Chamber but I say to him that the FCO sought a critical review of what happened with regard to the tsunami. The review has been generally positive. Some things were less than positive but we have learnt those lessons and are already applying them.
	On the thorny question of post closures, on 14 December 2004 my right honourable friend Jack Straw announced that we would be closing a number of posts in Africa, the Americas, Europe and the Pacific. I understand the reaction that this announcement caused in many quarters. We have understandable attachments to many of those posts. In many cases we could see potential for their continued existence. In many cases being in a particular country reflected historic friendship. A decision to close a post is never made lightly, as all noble Lords who have worked in the Foreign Office will know, not least because of the effect it has on staff, especially local staff who have served the UK loyally and well. But decisions to open and close sovereign and subordinate posts are made quite frequently. That must be part of the good management of FCO resources around the globe. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Garel-Jones, has appealed to any incoming government, if they were a Conservative one, to reverse that process. I emphasise that it would be a reversal of a process. From 1979 to 1997 the FCO closed 31 posts, largely in western Europe and North America, and opened seven posts, mostly in Asia. I do not complain about those changes, for I believe they were judgments made in order to deliver the priorities of the time.
	Since 1997 we have made a series of changes in the overseas network, also in response to changing priorities. But staffing has grown by 9 per cent. We have opened 18 new sovereign and subordinate posts, along with 13 locally staffed posts, while in that period 10 posts have been closed. It is interesting, for me at least, to note that Germany has 10 per cent fewer missions than Canada, and that India has 30 per cent fewer missions than Italy. I have never heard it said when people talk of the dynamism of the Indian economy that they can somehow not perform around the world because they have that relative difference in numbers. The decisions were taken after careful review and we were made to ensure, quite rightly, that FCO resources were best matched to the UK's priorities and objectives. Most of the resources released will not be wholly available for reprioritisation until 2006–07, because of the need to meet the costs of redundancy and other transitional costs.
	I turn to the issue of DfID and FCO funding, a rather sharp element in this important debate. Comparisons have been made between the relative increase in resources for the FCO and for the Department for International Development. Many noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Park of Monmouth, and the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, raised the point. The comparison is not wholly helpful, as the nature of spend in the two departments is different and, as noble Lords have noted, this Government are committed to raising the level of overseas aid to 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2013. We urged this on our G8 and European partners and, despite some expressions of pain, they have mostly gone in the same direction.
	This is largely money which will be spent through DfID which, unlike the FCO, has a high proportion of programme spend in its budgets. In accordance with government policy on global commitments to eradicate poverty, these are increasing at 9 per cent a year. The prizes are considerable and inspiring; the eradication of hunger, the introduction of primary education and of good health as development for the poorest and hungriest on our planet. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, was typically generous about that. The FCO's programmes—the Global Opportunities Fund and the Global Conflict Prevention Pool—will increase by just over 7 per cent per year from £202 million to £313 million. That has been largely translated into valuable projects.
	The resources are more than money alone. The staff in both departments mainly deliver the United Kingdom's international strategic priorities, in the UK and overseas, and will continue to do so. DfID will make its own case in next year's White Paper. It will no doubt demonstrate the strides taken this year at Gleneagles, and elsewhere; strides which we will continue to take. It will no doubt also address the critics who focused on some elements of its expenditure such as consultancy. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, said, diplomacy is critical to DfID missions. I hope that I have covered the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, who asked for a comparison of expenditure including those involved in MoD munitions.
	The noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, made an interesting point. I am committed to the argument that trade will do a vast amount more than aid will ever do. Most economists would argue the same. In order to eradicate poverty, we need a solid launching pad. Some of the aid expenditure will provide that and some debt forgiveness will help lift trade much further.
	As I have said, between now and next summer the Government will be undertaking a comprehensive spending review. I hope that noble Lords will accept that I will be deeply interested in budgets; FCO Ministers are not uninterested in those, if I may say so. We will be looking at the entirety of government spending in the context of five long-term challenges facing the UK. There is a strong international dimension to many if not all of these challenges, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said. It may well be that the FCO will want to develop proposals on how to do that.
	The FCO has to be persuasive; not just to Government and to Parliament, but to a wider public. It will need to show not only what it can achieve with more resources but how it has been a good steward of the resources that it has. I will try to deal in correspondence with many of the other issues raised, but this has been a debate about setting the path and the prism through which we should understand what is taking place.
	In concluding, I make this appeal. Addressing global challenges—whether narcotics, terrorism, trade or the environment—and delivering consular and migration services lie at the heart of the strategy. The strategy has been widely discussed and has broad support in Parliament. The Foreign Office takes its decisions on resources best to achieve these strategic priorities. It is against the delivery of that strategy that the FCO should be judged. That is what I ask your Lordships' House to do.
	The raw metrics where some claim cuts and I say that we can demonstrate growth are not really fulfilling the substance of that judgment. The judgment is on this: what are we trying to do and have we made the best available provision to do it? Let us judge what we do in this country by that set of equations. They are the only rational ones.

Lord Howe of Aberavon: My Lords, I thank all the noble Lords who joined in this interesting and diverse debate. I particularly thank the Minister for his reply, which was as comprehensive as ever. Some cynical lawyers say that even in an affidavit the truth will out. The truth that has emerged in his reply is that his heart is in the right place, and we express our appreciation for that.
	I also want to express my appreciation for the remarks made by the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, and express our general admiration for her performance during her long stint in the field in this House. It is good to see her back, even if it is on the wrong bit of the Front Bench. I also express my pleasure at finding myself in partnership once again with the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond. We always argued as to which one of us was the other's boss, and have never really resolved it, but it was a useful partnership.
	Of course, as everyone else has, I also welcome the remarkable maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes. It has rightly been proclaimed as Patten-speak. It was interesting that the Patten-speak ace was swiftly trumped by Park-speak. They must be labelled together as "Oxford-speak", which I say with regret. They effectively exposed the instincts of the Treasury with great candour. We all recognise that the Treasury instinctively wishes to erode the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but that is almost secondary to the bluster from No. 10 rather than No. 11 Downing Street, which is a wish not to erode but to control. That message came out loud and clear.
	I must attribute my final remark to the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad. We all agree that the resources for this important aspect of promoting Britain's interests should be realistic and not exiguous. I am sure that everyone in the House will share my hope that today's debate will have at least some effect in getting that message through to both No. 10 and No. 11. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Hercules Crash: Board of Inquiry

Lord Drayson: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement made in another place by my right honourable friend the Defence Secretary. The Statement is as follows:
	"I am able to inform the House today of the findings of the Royal Air Force Board of Inquiry into the tragic crash of the RAF Hercules XV179 in Iraq on 30 January 2005. I regret that some of the details were in two papers this morning—some right, some wrong—but the families had already been notified.
	"I first pay tribute to the 10 service personnel who lost their lives aboard the Hercules while carrying out their duties—Flight Lieutenant David Stead, Flight Lieutenant Paul Pardoel, Flight Lieutenant Andrew Smith, Master Air Engineer Gary Nicholson, Flight Sergeant Mark Gibson, Chief Technician Richard Brown, Sergeant Robert O'Connor, Corporal David Williams, Lance-Corporal Steven Jones and Squadron Leader Patrick Marshall. I am immensely proud of our Armed Forces and the work they undertake on our behalf. This was the biggest single loss of life in a single incident to enemy action in Iraq. These 10 brave men lost their lives while working in support of the coalition operation in Iraq. We owe them, and all our other personnel who daily confront danger, our respect and gratitude.
	"We must not forget their families and friends. I am sure the House will join me in offering our sympathy and deepest condolences. The Ministry of Defence, the Royal Air Force and RAF Lyneham in particular continue to provide the families and friends with support while they continue to come to terms with this tragedy. I recognise that the Board of Inquiry report will be painful reading for them, but I hope that the families and friends will take some comfort in finding answers to the many questions that arise after an incident such as this. I felt it important that the families were given time to prepare for the inevitable media interest, so they were briefed by an RAF team yesterday on the conclusions of the Board of Inquiry. I hope that, notwithstanding the prerogative, they will understand why it was right to brief them first. They will be able to rely on the support of their friends and colleagues in the Army and the RAF, formally and informally, for as long as they need it.
	"I would also like to pay tribute to RAF Lyneham, whose close community was hit hard by this tragedy yet managed to maintain its magnificent support for our deployed forces, both at the time of the crash and subsequently.
	"Turning now to the report itself, I would like to remind honourable Members that the purpose of a Board of Inquiry is to establish the circumstances of the crash and to learn lessons. It does not seek to apportion blame.
	"The Board of Inquiry was convened on 31 January—the day after the event—and has considered a mass of evidence. The board has established that: on 30 January 2005, an RAF Hercules C130K took off from Baghdad at 13.24 Greenwich Mean Time en route to Balad on a routine operational passenger and freight flight; at 13.30 a radio message was received from the crew stating that the aircraft was on fire; at 13.55 the Hercules was confirmed as missing—the expected time of arrival at Balad—and at 14.15 the crash site was found by the crews of a US helicopter formation.
	"On our behalf, US forces established a cordon around the crash scene and maintained it for as long as it was considered safe to do so. This they did at risk to themselves and US personnel, for which I am very grateful. The Board of Inquiry was convened and took on the task of recovering the bodies of the deceased and examining the aircraft wreckage for evidence. I commend the professionalism and dedication of all those involved in this difficult and harrowing work—a task which had to be completed as swiftly as possible because of the ever present threat of hostile attack. Much of the wreckage could not be retrieved in the time available before the cordon was lifted.
	"Despite the loss of physical evidence, the lack of credible witnesses close to the crash site and the absence of an accident data recorder, the Board of Inquiry has none the less conducted a thorough and comprehensive investigation. The board has examined all possible causes, eliminated those not supported by the available evidence and then thoroughly analysed the remainder until the most likely cause was identified. Throughout this process the board has been assisted by other agencies, including a senior air accident investigator from the Air Accidents Investigation Branch—the AAIB—of the Department for Transport. This experienced investigator independently investigated the crash in parallel and his findings fully support those of the board. Furthermore, the AAIB investigator has stated that he was impressed by the approach adopted by the RAF team given the exceptionally difficult circumstances of the investigation.
	"On 7 March, my predecessor, now the Leader of the House, made a Written Statement to the House about the inquiry's interim findings. That interim Statement ruled out a number of possible causes for the crash.
	"After this exhaustive analysis, the Board of Inquiry has concluded that the aircraft crashed because it became uncontrollable after hostile ground-to-air fire caused the outboard right-hand wing to explode and separate from the aircraft. The crash was not survivable. The board identified three contributory factors: flying at low level in daylight made the aircraft vulnerable to some types of ground-to-air fire; the lack of a fuel tank inerting system in the wing fuel tank meant that it was possible for an explosive fuel/air mixture to develop; and the flow of intelligence information regarding ground-to-air fire was not as robust as it might have been.
	"I remind the House that the point of the inquiry is to learn from it, not to apportion blame. The board has made a number of recommendations which we will study closely. We have acted on some of them already. During the course of the inquiry, as the findings were emerging, the Commander-in-Chief of RAF Strike Command instigated a number of steps. C130 tactics have been reviewed, and low-level flying in daylight is now being avoided whenever possible. However, it has not been prohibited, as it can sometimes be the safest way of achieving an operational objective and we need to allow operational commanders in theatre the flexibility to choose the safest effective tactics to achieve their mission. The fitting of a fuel tank inerting system is being investigated as a matter of urgency and we have made changes to our ground-to-air fire reporting and dissemination system.
	"Now that the Board of Inquiry has concluded, the full contents of this report will be thoroughly considered and acted on as appropriate. While we have to accept that any deployment of UK troops involves a degree of risk—and sometimes considerable risk—the security of British servicemen and women deployed to Iraq and elsewhere is our highest priority. We owe it to our personnel to do everything we can do to ensure their safety.
	"This is a very comprehensive report. A military aircraft accident summary will be placed in the Library of the House and on the MoD's Internet site. In addition, a redacted version of the main body of the Board of Inquiry report will be available on our Internet site. As you will appreciate—and I know that the House will—the safety of our people is a principal consideration, and we have rightly removed from the report any information that might endanger the security or capability of UK and coalition personnel or might be of use to an enemy. That is the purpose of the redaction.
	"For example, we have, for operational reasons, removed the detail of the exact weapon type used against the Hercules: to divulge this information would give the insurgents what they need to replicate the attack. It would be unhelpful to our forces and our coalition partners for the media to speculate on the weapon deployed. This is not a theoretical risk. It is very real. We have, however, tried to be as open as possible under all these circumstances.
	"Our forces have made a significant contribution to creating the right conditions for wider peace and stability in Iraq. They have done, and continue to do, an excellent job in difficult conditions. Our deepest sympathies go out to those who have lost loved ones or have been injured in operations. I can only speak in the highest terms of the qualities of all personnel who serve and have served there, as I know from my own visits and discussions.
	"In conclusion, therefore, the Board of Inquiry into the crash of Hercules XV179 is now complete. I repeat my gratitude to the president of the board and his team for their painstaking work. I am sure that the House will join me once again in expressing deepest sympathies to the families and friends of the victims of this tragic incident. We must never forget or underestimate the courage and professionalism of our service personnel in carrying out the tasks required of them".
	My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

Lord Astor of Hever: My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement, and join him in paying tribute to the 10 service personnel who lost their lives. We on these Benches offer our sympathy to their families. We also join the Minister in being immensely proud of our Armed Forces for the work they undertake on our behalf in Iraq. I join the Minister in paying tribute to RAF Lyneham; to the Board of Inquiry for conducting a comprehensive and thorough investigation so quickly; to the other agencies that assisted them, not least the RAF team; and to the US forces which established and maintained a cordon around the crash scene at considerable risk to themselves.
	I am pleased that the report has come to a clear conclusion, and that the air crew have been exonerated. I am relieved that, although low-level flying in daylight is being avoided whenever possible, operational commanders in theatre will be allowed the flexibility to choose the safest effective tactics to achieve their mission.
	We all understand that it is inevitable that losses will be suffered in warfare. Therefore, we on these Benches believe that we should be very careful with our questions in a case like this.
	The Statement pointed out the absence of an accident data recorder. Is this the case across the fleet, or is it just on this particular aircraft? The Statement mentioned that fitting a fuel tank inerting system is being investigated as a matter of urgency. For the sake of the families of the air crew of existing fleet, and the servicemen and women who will be flying in them, can we have an assurance that, if it is considered necessary, all similar aircraft flying in Iraq and Afghanistan will be fitted with such a system without delay?
	Have our key coalition partners suffered any similar losses? If so, can the Minister confirm that discussions have taken place with them with lessons learned? Have any of these allies, particularly the United States, modified any of their aircraft?
	This may have been an unavoidable accident. The Statement said, however, that the flow of intelligence was not as robust as it might have been. Have steps been taken to improve this?
	Finally, the Statement mentioned that an accident summary will be placed in the Library of the House of Commons, and on the MoD's Internet site. Can the Minister confirm that a copy will also be placed in the Library of this House, and that it will be placed on the MoD's website with immediate effect?

Lord Garden: My Lords, I also thank the Minister for repeating this important Statement in your Lordships' House, and for providing a copy so that we could look at it ahead of time.
	I join the rest of the House, from these Benches, in expressing again our sympathy to the families of the 10 servicemen, Army and Air Force—indeed, one Australian as well as nine Britons—who died in this tragic accident. The families have had to live with this loss, and will have to for years to come.
	I was moved by the fact that the Statement addressed the effect on RAF Lyneham in some detail. I remember from my own command of an operational RAF station, where we lost an aircraft with a number of crew aboard, that the effect on the station is really quite dramatic. The station will rally round—it has to, to continue to do the job. It is a traumatic event, however, which takes a long time for a station to get over. Of course, RAF Lyneham has to continue its operational tasks day by day. It was good for that to be reflected in the Statement, and I know that it will mean a lot to the people at Lyneham.
	The Statement also covers the difficulties of the accident investigation. All aircraft accident investigations are very difficult. Inevitably, after a crash, there are pieces everywhere and the evidence is very difficult to gather. In this case, of course, the evidence was much more difficult to gather than usual. The decision to secure the site, and how long it could be protected for, must have been difficult. In that case, it is a triumph for the investigation teams to have come to a firm conclusion in the end. Often, in much more peaceful accidents—if I can call them that—it is difficult to establish the exact cause. In this case, it has been done. That will comfort the families, and those crews who have to continue operating the C130, knowing that the cause has been found.
	We on these Benches certainly accept the caveats in the Statement over the security considerations, and what can and cannot be said. I congratulate the Minister on providing quite a large amount of information, considering the circumstances.
	All accidents tend to have a number of contributory causes that come together in one place at one time. In this case, three contributory factors have been identified. One is that the aircraft was low flying in daylight; another is that the inert fuel tank system was not fitted; and a third was some problems in terms of information on the ground-to-air threat. I do not intend to ask detailed questions now, because I know that you need to study boards of inquiry and look carefully before you get the full picture. When I come to look at it—I will read it once it is placed in the Library—the area that will interest me is low flying. Obviously, the regulations have subsequently changed, and there will be a question over whether the low flying was operationally necessary at that time. It does not matter whether the Minister is able to offer a view on that at this stage. He may want to write subsequently, or he may be able to say that it is in the full Board of Inquiry.
	A useful precedent has been set in reporting significant operational losses to Parliament when we are in operational theatres. Of course, this crash had much publicity associated with it because of the high number of deaths—the greatest number of people killed in one event during our time in Iraq, sadly. We have had others, of course. I think particularly of the reports emerging in the aviation press of the loss of a Harrier on the ground in Afghanistan, and probably damage to a second, with no loss of life. Obviously, that is a very large expense in lost aircraft to the Ministry of Defence. When the Board of Inquiry for that event has finished, will the Minister be producing a report for the House?
	Finally, this is a sobering reminder of the courage of all our Armed Forces, as they have to operate in difficult theatres whether they are in the air, on the ground or at sea. Our thoughts in this House must be with them all at this time.

Lord Drayson: My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their tributes, and the sensitive way in which they have raised their questions. This is greatly appreciated. The point that the noble Lord, Lord Garden, made about RAF Lyneham is well noted, as is his recognition of the excellent work carried out by the Board of Inquiry. In response to the specific questions raised by noble Lords, I will go through them in turn.
	This particular aircraft, a K-type aircraft built in 1967, did not have a flight recorder. It is not possible to fit a digital flight recorder to aircraft of this type. The J-type aircraft has a flight recorder and we add flight recorders to the more modern aircraft we have in theatre. The fitting of the inerting system, to prevent the explosion of fuel tanks within the wing, is a matter for the RAF to decide. I had a discussion on this very subject with the Chief of Air Force Staff this morning. They are looking at this with all urgency. If they decide that it is something they need to see done, it will be done with all speed.
	With regard to matters of intelligence, the House will recognise that there has to be a balance, on operations, between the needs of security and the free flow of information; both are important for the safety of our crews on operations. In hindsight, looking at the circumstances of this case, it is clear that that balance could have been improved. We have learned the lessons: changes have been made to the systems for intelligence-sharing in theatre. We need to learn to make sure that an appropriate balance is struck and to recognise the tension that exists on operations.
	I can confirm that the Board of Inquiry's publication will be placed in the Library of this House, and on the MoD's website in a redacted form. I am grateful for the noble Lord's recognition that these results need to be studied carefully. In the matter of low flying, I can say that Hercules aircraft, when attacked in the past, have not experienced a catastrophic explosion leading to a separation of the wing. Therefore, it was not regarded as a significant risk and the practice of low flying was retained on operations across relatively short distances. The judgment, taken by the captains of the crews, was that low flying mitigated risk by avoiding attacks at a higher level. In the light of these circumstances, as we have said in the Statement, this advice about low flying in daylight has now been changed, while retaining the ability for operational commanders to take a decision on the ground, depending on the absolute circumstances.
	The lessons we have learned through this tragic event have been implemented immediately wherever possible. We are looking urgently at matters relating to the modifications of aircraft; these will be carried out if the RAF judges them to be necessary. We note that some of our coalition partners have modified their aircraft and are in the process of doing so on more aircraft this year. And yes, of course, we will share the results of the Board of Inquiry with our coalition partners, following its publication today.

Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, has expressed the findings of the inquiry very clearly. I have been involved in inquiries in the past and have, indeed, been inquired on. There is one particular interest I have in this: the role of the Air Accidents Investigation Branch. I am delighted to know that it has played such a full part in the activities that have taken place, and which helped the Ministry of Defence come to its conclusion. In respect of that, can the noble Lord say whether, in spite of the age of the K-model Hercules, devices for deciding the parameters involved in this sort of accident, or some sort of flight data recording system, might not sensibly be retro-fitted, bearing in mind the length of time for which they are likely to remain in service? There are examples of other aircraft of similar age which have been retro-fitted with that sort of equipment, and I have personal experience of those in helicopters. I wonder if the noble Lord could bear that in mind.

Lord Drayson: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, for raising this important point. Given the age of the aircraft, it is not possible to fit a full digital flight recorder. It is possible, as some of our coalition partners have done, to fit a basic accident data recorder to the aircraft; this has been done successfully. We are now looking at the possibility of fitting such a much more basic accident data recorder to these aircraft.

Earl Attlee: My Lords, I give my condolences to the families of the crew. On the inerting systems, will the Minister be careful to avoid falling into the trap of expending resources on attempting to prevent the most recent disaster, instead of mitigating the risk of an accident of higher probability and worse consequences? In other words, will he prioritise his expenditure correctly, in order to have the best effect? Also, could he tell us the maximum number of passengers that can be carried in a Hercules aircraft?

Lord Drayson: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for his advice. He is right: it is very important to get the balance in these matters correct, and that is why this is a matter for the RAF to decide what it regards as the appropriate priorities. It is then for Ministers to take on board the recommendations and to act with all speed following them. I do not know the maximum number of passengers that can be carried on a Hercules aircraft, but I will write to the noble Earl with the precise answer.

Prisons: Education and Health

Lord Hurd of Westwell: rose to call attention to education and health in prisons; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, the House spends a good deal of time discussing prisons and conditions in Her Majesty's prisons. In the past six weeks we have had the Unstarred Question of the noble Lord, Lord Chan, and the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, on suicides. I make no apology for returning to this subject this afternoon. There are two reasons for this. First, there is new material to consider, as there always is. It is not only very welcome but it is material the House ought to spend a moment or two reflecting upon. Secondly, I believe that this House has assumed a particular responsibility for prisons, not, of course, constitutionally in any way, but as a matter of practical fact. That is partly because of the presence in this House of Members with a particular interest in—and anxiety about—the state of our prisons, based on their own personal knowledge. Partly it is because prisons are part of the public service, which is not, in my view, well served by the ordinary processes of politics.
	There are two reasons for that. First, they do not fit in to the preconceptions of our media, which tend to oversimplify these matters extensively. Secondly, there is the tradition—now, perhaps, becoming modified—of partisan debate in the other place, which rather gets in the way of discussing these matters in the rational way that is necessary when dealing with human beings in prison and with crime and its victims.
	I am sure that this will not be a partisan debate. Indeed, I will begin by saying that I believe, from what I see and read, that great progress has been made in recent years, particularly since the Department for Education and Skills and the Department of Health took over responsibility for education and health, respectively, in prisons. In some areas this progress, which in itself is welcome, brings problems because of the law of unintended consequences. A sad paradox is beginning to emerge in one or two sectors, to which I think it is worth—indeed necessary—to draw attention. If you improve some areas of treatment inside prison, without making clear to everybody—and I am thinking, in particular, of magistrates and judges—that prison is a last resort, intended and designed only for serious and violent offenders, you run the risk of encouraging the court to use custodial sentences as a means of obtaining, for example, rudimentary drug treatment, mental health care, or a second chance at education, because they do not believe that these elementary services will be available to the people concerned outside prison. That is a lamentable state of affairs, and I shall give two examples of it that have come my way.
	First, I hear that in some areas magistrates and judges feel that a person will be more likely to get a detox if he is an offender in prison than he will by relying on a health facility outside. The second example comes from information published by the Prison Reform Trust. Here, I declare an interest as president of that trust. In our report on women on remand—I remind the House that two-thirds of women in prison are there on remand—we found that a good many of them are sent into custody because that seems to be the simplest way to obtain a psychiatric assessment. That is not a good reason for sending a woman to prison, yet occasionally it is happening.
	I know that the Minister is having a very busy week and I am grateful to her, but I shall repeat what I said earlier because she was not here. In this case, the law of unintended consequences could mean that, because of the progress that is being made there, prison can become a sort of welfare warehouse for those who have been failed by other public services. Therefore I hope that the Minister can make it clear, as I hope the Government will always do, that prison is simply not the right place for welfare provision. The circumstances and the atmosphere are wrong. The way in which, alas, prisoners are moved at high speed from one prison to another makes it a deeply unsuitable forum for welfare provision simply because that provision may be scarce elsewhere.
	Good things can be done in prison, and that is what I am sure this debate will focus on. But they can be no substitute for preventive services being available to people at risk before an offence is committed and before there is any question of a custodial sentence.
	I turn to the subject of health. There were two recent studies in which the Prison Reform Trust had a hand. One is concerned with HIV and hepatitis in prisons in the United Kingdom. It found that 9 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women in prison suffer from hepatitis C. That rate is 20 times higher than that among the general population. The HIV rate for men is 15 times higher than that outside prison. If one reads this report, one cannot be satisfied by the way in which these diseases are tackled inside prison. It is suggested that a third of the prisons surveyed in the report have no HIV policy and one in five has no hepatitis policy.
	I am told—I am not an expert on this; others may be—that the test for hepatitis C is not too difficult or complicated. Can the Minister assure us that, if it is not in place already, there will before long be a consistent system of testing for hepatitis C across the prison system? The report contains eight practical recommendations, but there is not time to run through them in detail. However, when the Minister replies, can she tell us what is being done in this area to bring the standards of testing and treatment up towards the levels which can be expected in the rest of the community?
	I move quickly to another area which is hugely important but is somewhat neglected because the public, and perhaps Ministers, focus so much on the treatment of illicit drugs that they forget about it. I refer to alcohol—a problem that has been with us for much longer. Two-thirds of sentenced male prisoners and two-fifths of women prisoners admit to hazardous drinking. That is a technical phrase which has been defined, and I think that we all know roughly what it means. In December last year, the Prison Service published an alcohol strategy. It remains of huge importance. Can the Minister tell us how prisoners are getting on with carrying that strategy into effect, and can she give us further news?
	I turn to the subject of mental disorder. Of all the distressing aspects of prison life and of all the things that are most gloomy and sad when one visits a prison, the worst is the spectacle of people who are there because they are suffering from a mental disorder which has led them into crime. The whole of our society is still at the beginning of understanding and treating mental disorder, but that is particularly so in the case of prisons. Again, there is a new report called Troubled Inside: Responding to the Mental Health Needs of Men in Prison. I commend it to those who understand the importance of the subject. I shall not go into the figures contained in the report. I shall just give one quotation which is included in the report. It is an anecdote from Erwin James, the former Guardian columnist and author. He writes of a visit to one prison:
	"On the wing there was plenty of evidence of behaviour brought on by mental distress . . . one young man only ever wore the same pair of jeans and a green nylon cagoule. He never wore shoes or socks, never went out on exercise, hardly ever spoke to anyone and was understood to have been taken advantage of sexually by predatory prisoners. He was in his early 20s with many years in prison still ahead of him".
	Any Members of this House who have visited prisons have come across that kind of person, about whom there is something particularly sad and distressing. I am sure that the Minister will agree with that general point. Can she tell us anything more about how resources, effort and skill are being devoted to treating mental disorder?
	I turn to the other wing of this debate—education. In their reply to the Select Committee report in June last year, the Government claimed that they had a clear and ambitious plan of reform. I am sure that the Minister will repeat that today. As we understand it, three regions were selected for the new Offenders' Learning and Skills Service, and it is, or was, planned to spread the service to the rest of the country either by or from, according to which document you read, August 2006. There is a bit of confusion (I do not want to overstate it) and a question mark about exactly what is happening with this regional start followed by the universal spread of the service—whether the timings have changed and whether thought about it has changed—and the Minister will tell us about that.
	There is of course good news—and I promised that this would not, as far as I am concerned, be a partisan debate. I am sure that is the wish of the whole House. We have to give credit to the improvements that have occurred, and the fact that the educational awards achieved by prisoners have increased by about 40 per cent in recent times is a remarkable one, on which all concerned deserve congratulation. I note two points about education. The test of employability is well to the fore, and that is understandable. If someone has achieved greater educational skills they are less likely to re-offend because they are more likely to be able to get and to keep a job. But that is not the total purpose of education. There are people for whom education may have a different purpose; perhaps a higher or more ambitious purpose. That is where distance learning can come in and where the work of the Prisoners' Education Trust can achieve formidable results. I hope that the Minister will say something in encouragement of that.
	Secondly on education, there is the problem of records transfer. The Select Committee in another place was scathing about the loss of records and the failure to transfer records, which it described as a "disgrace". I can imagine few things more disagreeable or discouraging for a prisoner than to have to sit a test or exam a second time that he has already obtained in another prison but is not recognised because someone has lost the papers on the way. Surely there should be—as the Government have promised—a system that prevents that kind of nonsense.
	I come towards the end with a difficult but necessary thought, and I will be interested to know whether noble Lords agree with it. I ask the Minister not to believe everything that is in her brief. That is not because anyone is trying to deceive her, or that she is wishing to deceive the House. It is simply because there is no sector of the public service in my experience where the gap between theory—what Ministers believe and are told—and practice on the ground is so certain. Each prison has its own flavour. Each prison has its own shortcomings. Each prison has its ways of concealing those shortcomings from the world; again not in any criminal way, but that is just the nature of the whole exercise. It needs constant probing by Ministers in person, by boards of visitors, and by people from outside. That is one reason why some of us are very sceptical about the Government's plan to boil down the different criminal justice inspectorates into one homogenous whole, because we may in that process lose the particular edge or skills and experience of the prisons inspectorate.
	The point of these services is not sufficiently understood by the public. I am sure that it is understood by Ministers and by the Prison Service, but as the Select Committee report illustrated, it is not sufficiently understood by the public as a whole, let alone by the media. It is this: criminals often show in court and in prison a bravado that conceals very low levels of self-esteem and of hope, whether in terms of their mental or physical health or their education. The point is that they have been sentenced, we assume rightly, to loss of liberty. They have not been sentenced to loss of hope. The programmes are right in themselves, and they are also important for the safety and future health of society once those individuals are released. Their purpose is to keep alive and to stimulate those flickers of hope that exist, to turn those flickers into energy, and to guide that energy into the best chance for the individual and therefore for the society to which that individual returns. That is the purpose. I hope that these debates and the attention that this House continues to pay to health and education in prisons will help in a small way to make that purpose better known and therefore to help it forward. I beg to move for Papers.

Lord Filkin: My Lords, I am sure that the House is very grateful that the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, has promoted this debate. There is a great respect in this Chamber for the depth of his experience and commitment to these issues.
	I start by declaring two interests: first that my daughter is a prison governor; and secondly that I was once, for a short period, the Minister with responsibility in the DfES for offender education. While I was there, I sought with my officials to clarify the prime objective of offender education. The noble Lord, Lord Hurd, is right—it is not simply employment. It goes wider than that. Certainly part of it is about increasing the employability of offenders so that they are less likely to re-offend. The same is true of some health interventions as well. It was pretty clear to me very early on that if you simply made improvements in the inputs into education and skills without doing a range of other things, those improvements were likely to have paltry effects.
	What is the problem? We are grateful for the tone that the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, has set. We are aware that improvements have been made on input and in the reduction overall in the amount of crime taking place in our society, despite what the papers sometimes choose to believe. But we are faced with the stark fact that 50 per cent of all crime is still committed by people who have been previous offenders. The process of offending does not stop. That matters to society through the misery and cost it causes; it matters to the individual who is on a treadmill of a damaged and potentially ruinous personal lifecycle; and it costs a fortune in direct state costs, let alone the indirect social costs.
	Why is that statistic so? There is not time and I know not enough to give a summary. However, some of the characteristics of many custodial offenders are stark: 47 per cent ran away from home; 27 per cent were taken into care; 30 per cent regularly truanted; 49 per cent were excluded from school; 52 per cent of men have no qualifications; 72 per cent suffer from two or more mental disorders; and 66 per cent take drugs. I am not a bleeding heart apologist. By signalling that, I do not imply that in some cosy world we should excuse all and forgive all. Clearly people are responsible for their actions and for owning the steps to change. But we would be na-ve if we thought that it was a simple "Whack 'em and all will be well" agenda. We are dealing with some of the most damaged individuals in our society who have weak personal and employment skills. In some cases, they re-offend because that is all they know to do.
	I also suggest that we have no reason for complacency despite grounds for celebrating the progress that has been made both in custodial policy and in education and health inputs. From the latest figures, the stark fact is that 60 per cent of ex-prisoners re-offend within two years. Let me put it more clearly. They are convicted of re-offending within two years. Noble Lords will know the difference. There will be more who have re-offended but have not been caught.
	Therefore we have a programme which, even admittedly by high standards, is not delivering the sort of outcomes for which we hope. It is not as effective in reducing re-offending as systems we may have seen in some other countries. Why is that so? It is not joined up; it is not focused enough; the problem of re-offending does not always seem to be its central goal. There is not an overall managerial responsibility across the system for reducing re-offending. The majority of prisoners receive little practical support pre- or post-offence. Above all, it is not a system.
	I illustrate that briefly. The cost of ex-prisoners to the criminal justice system and across society is about £11 billion per annum. As part of that, the cost of the Prison Service and the probation service is £3.5 billion. Yet 90 per cent of prisoners leave prison without a job. According to the Prison Reform Trust—I have no reason to doubt it—about 90,000 prisoners in England and Wales are released each year without a fixed abode. That is not a system about which we can be complacent that the status quo is fine and we can rest on our laurels.
	What would be a better system? Time does not allow me to go into detail. However, in September we had a remarkable speech by the Home Secretary when he set out new directions for criminal reform. It was perhaps the best thing I have read for a long time in terms of intellectual clarity and comprehensiveness as to what a better system would look like. The noble Lord, Lord Hurd, is right. The system must treat everyone the same. One cannot have perverse incentives. Whether custodial or non-custodial, one starts with a proper assessment of the individual's needs, skills, employment history, psychological needs and problems, health needs and so on. One would know the problem that the individual had. From that, one would seek to build up a diagnosis of what needed to be done with that individual. Tough love would then follow whereby the state would say to that individual, "We for our part will work with you to try to address some of the problems you are experiencing; and we will commit to incentives to do so and, if possible, to put you through a process of training and support such that at the end we will try to find a real employer who wants to employ you in the area in which you have been living". There would be a clear contract and commitment with them. For his part, he would be expected to commit to that and there would be reward and sanctions for him if he did so. Incentives are important at individual, institutional and systemic levels.
	As part of that system, one would have to develop the demand side. We have great evidence already from Transco and others. The CBI has shown commitment in getting employers at national and local level to commit to working with offenders and supporting them in getting back into employment—in the individual's interest, in employers' interest and in society's interest. We would clearly have to ensure that there was housing and continuing support pre- and post-prison and that families were worked with to ensure continuing links. The voluntary sector does important work in that respect.
	One would have to construct a totally integrated and managed package of support from beginning to end. It is not how the system works at present. That is why we need to recognise that we cannot carry on doing the same things that we have been doing. Change is painful for organisations and individuals. Brilliant work is being done in the prison and probation services, but to claim that carrying on as we are is satisfactory will not do. Therefore, we have to look for innovation and fresh ways of attacking these serious problems in our interest, in society's interest and in the interest of prisoners.

Baroness Thomas of Walliswood: My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, for introducing this debate. His distinguished career as a former Home Secretary gives him particular authority in introducing this important subject and his speech illustrated that very well. As I know that my noble friend will deal with education in prisons when winding up from these Benches, I shall concentrate on the health problems of women in prison.
	Compared with men, very few women are accused or convicted of serious offences. They make up only 5 per cent of known offenders and 6 per cent of the prison population, but the number of women in prison has nearly tripled in recent years, from an average of 1,560 in 1993 to 4,580 in March 2004, compared with an increase in the male prison population of about 50 per cent during the same period. Many of these women are on remand, mostly prior to being convicted. About 20 per cent of them will eventually be acquitted and 60 per cent will receive a non-custodial sentence. Seventy per cent of women sentenced to prison are on short sentences of less than 12 months, and the vast majority of women in prison are convicted for non-violent crimes, mostly frequently theft or handling stolen goods.
	Women in prison have some special characteristics that are not present to the same extent in the male prison population. According to a Home Office report in 2003, a majority have experienced some form of abuse, and 20 per cent—compared with 2 per cent of the population in general—have been in care, a recognised predictor of offending behaviour. Another Home Office report, on prisoners' drug use and treatment, found that two-thirds of women prisoners were either drug dependent or abusing alcohol in the year prior to their imprisonment. A Department of Health report has confirmed the pattern of greater mental health and associated problems in the female as compared to the male prison population. Some 37 per cent of women in prison have already tried to commit suicide before they get there. That is a higher rate than among women in general and among men in prison. Debates and Questions in your Lordships' House have highlighted the high rate of suicide among women prisoners and the criticism of the care of those who attempt suicide which is levelled against prisons by the Chief Inspector of Prisons and by some coroners' courts.
	An additional problem is that of fitting women into the very scattered women's prison estate. Women are often held in prison far from their families and, in particular, far from their children. They are too frequently moved from one prison to another. Clearly, properly planned and delivered healthcare is made far more difficult when the patient is literally a moving target. The question therefore arises of what sort of care women prisoners receive for their mental health and addiction problems while they are in prison. After all, imprisonment is the punishment, not isolation from essential health services. In 2003, a Prison Reform Trust report was quite clear on the treatment of women prisoners with mental health problems. It stated:
	"Having been failed in the community, these women are disadvantaged further by being placed in a prison system where mental health care is of a lower standard than in the NHS".
	That is despite the fact that the NHS is now responsible for the healthcare of prisoners. There is also evidence of over-medication of women prisoners, not necessarily as a result of careful assessment of need, but as a way of "containing a problem".
	A therapeutic prison "community" for women was established recently, attached to West Hill men's prison in Winchester. However, it seems that the pressure of increases in the male prison population has led to the women being removed from this special unit. Can the Minister tell us whether the unit has been re-established elsewhere?
	Proper assessment of the needs of women prisoners is obviously essential. Can the Minister tell us whether the CARAT teams, which provide assessment and referral services to all prisoners, really function effectively in dealing with women prisoners? Is there not a danger that the churning about of women prisoners within the prison estate and the fact that women may serve their sentences upwards of 50 or 60 miles from their home make it almost impossible for them to do their work well, particularly in handing prisoners over to the local health services when they are released from prison?
	With regard to drug treatment, the only prison-based service for women is at Send prison, which I visited as a member of Surrey probation committee. It is available only to prisoners serving long-term sentences. What is being done to treat the majority of prisoners on shorter sentences who are drug dependent? What has happened to the Women's Offending Reduction Programme—WORP—designed to address the factors that affect women's offending behaviour? It seems not to be mentioned in the context of establishing the new National Offender Management Service—NOMS—which will combine both the prison and the probation services.
	Fundamentally, I have to ask myself, Members of your Lordships' House and the Minister whether it makes any sense at all to imprison for non-violent crimes vulnerable women who are desperately in need of treatment for drug dependency or mental health problems. Would not community punishment within their own locality, combined with drug treatment and testing orders and proper mental health care, if necessary in local national health services, be far more effective? The DTTOs in particular have a proven record of success in the hands of the probation service. Might not such an approach also be much less expensive?
	The costs of inappropriate treatment for women in the criminal justice system are very great. Prison is itself a very expensive punishment. It costs approximately £35,000 a year to keep someone in prison. Reconviction rates for women are rising, adding to costs within the jurisprudence system that have been assessed at about £68,000 per case. Surely the sums spent locally could enable local services to supervise community sentences and provide medical and social care to women prisoners and their families. The costs of providing for the estimated 17,000 children who are affected by their mother's imprisonment are also considerable, as are the social costs of the breakdown of family life, which, as I have said, is a major predictor of offending behaviour in young people.
	Have the Government taken on board the potential impact of the Wedderburn committee's recommendations in favour of local women's supervision, rehabilitation and support centres—which is a more carefully worked-out sort of approach which I have suggested? I believe that not only women offenders but society at large would benefit enormously from reducing the number of women in prison and increasing the number of female offenders punished and treated in the community.

The Earl of Listowel: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Hurd of Westwell, for allowing us this opportunity again to consider how to make good the failures we have perpetrated on so many of the young people who are taken into custody. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Walliswood, and to hear what she said about the importance of paying better attention to the needs of mothers who are taken into custody.
	I welcome the significant increased investment that the Government have made in recent years in the education of children in the secure estate. I regret that in recent months there has been a significant rise in the number of children in custody. Clearly, that threatens to undo the work undertaken to improve their educational attainment. In February, during the passage of the Education Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, made an undertaking to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, with regard to a meeting on the education of children in custody. Since then, there has been an election. What is the Government's intention now?
	I will address the needs of 18 to 20 year-olds in custody, who are widely acknowledged to be a neglected group, particularly the importance of their success in education and health. Permitting them to develop trusting relationships with adults and, wherever possible, a trusting relationship with a particular adult is also widely acknowledged as important. Voice for the Child in Care, which is a children's advocacy charity, working with children in care and, now, with children in custody, consulted children in the care of the state on what they thought a model care system should be. The children's first priority was that there should be respect for the relationships of children in care, including relationships with their siblings, their parents—where possible—and their foster carers.
	This morning I received an e-mail with a note of a quotation from a care leaver. To paraphrase, the youngster said, "We like social workers. They are nice. It is just a pity that they don't stay around very long", which gives a sense of the continually changing relationships of children in care. I was very gratified to hear the Home Secretary, the right honourable Charles Clarke, recently highlight the importance of mentoring for offenders and establishing those important relationships.
	The noble Lord, Lord Filkin, referred to work by National Grid Transco, which started in, I believe, 1999, training in forklift driving for 18 to 20 year-olds in custody. There is the ambition that by 2007, 1,000 ex-offenders will be in employment having been trained. Typically, the training lasts about 12 weeks. It is a highly selective course taken outside prison, so the offenders are on licence. It is highly industry specific. The normal reoffending rate for this group of under-21 year-olds is about 70 per cent, but for those who have done the National Grid Transco course the reoffending rate is 7 per cent.
	It is particularly interesting that when young offenders leave prison and have a guaranteed job with a utility company—perhaps, a water utility—they tend to work with men of 40 to 50 years old. It is an ageing workforce. They are always mentored by someone of about that age. I spoke to a mentor who said that this was the most rewarding job that he had had in his professional career. This is an opportunity for these young men to find something that, perhaps for the first time in their lives, they are good and successful at and can achieve. They also have a trusted adult who is prepared to take an interest in them and their career, who will stay with them for a good period of time. I welcome the strong partnership that the Government have established with National Grid Transco and its future development across five industrial sectors.
	I pay tribute to Lieutenant Colonel Trevor Philpott. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is a tremendous enthusiast and supporter of his work. The lieutenant colonel established the life-change approach in his charity C-FAR, with 12 weeks of intensive activity for a group of young offenders, some of whom are very difficult to work with. In the last year of this charity's work, by the end of the 12 weeks every one of the young offenders had found accommodation and was in some sort of meaningful, purposeful activity. The principles behind what C-FAR is doing are exactly right: engaging young people—who have every reason to distrust adults—with adults who provide interesting, stimulating activities, then connecting them with mentors in the community and working in close partnership with local business and voluntary agencies to ensure that they have accommodation and purposeful activity at the end. This is exactly right.
	I see my time is up, so in conclusion I simply repeat that to achieve an education and good health—including good mental health—it is vital for these young people in particular to experience trusting relationships with adults and, wherever possible, a trusting relationship with a particular adult. This was highlighted recently by the Social Exclusion Unit's report on young people with complex needs. I look forward to the Minister's response.

Baroness Gibson of Market Rasen: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hurd of Westwell, for instigating this debate on such an important subject. The debate is important because a civilised society must partly be judged by the way it runs its prisons and treats its prisoners. I want to concentrate on one area of health: occupational health in our prisons, and the occupational health of prison officers. These men and women spend their working lives carrying out a job which I, for one, would not wish to do: looking after those individuals who, on our behalf, are incarcerated within our prison walls for varying lengths of time, depending on their crimes. I declare an interest, as my husband is a former chair of the Prison Officers' Association, and I therefore know at first hand about the lives of these workers.
	While working at the TUC 25 years ago, I had responsibility for the TUC's policy in this area. I was a member of the Home Office, TUC and CBI committee which oversaw work provided within prisons for prisoners. As such, I visited many prisons in the UK—often not a happy experience. I remember well from those days a maxim which is still true today: the living environment of prisoners is the working environment of prison staff. If the prison is an unhealthy and stressful place for prisoners, it follows that it is an unhealthy and stressful place for prison staff. Your Lordships may know that I am also the president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, which each month produces a journal on occupational safety and health. Fortuitously, this month there is an article in it, "Health behind bars", and it is from this that I have gained my most recent information on occupational health in prisons.
	The article begins by pointing out that, according to reports from the prison inspectorate, the Prison Service in the past seems to have believed that occupational health was for other people to consider, not for it. It goes on to say that changes are taking place—some successful and some less so. The prisons system still suffers from overcrowding, which creates stress and stretches resources to their limits. Basic amenities suffer: for example, drainage systems become overwhelmed. Basic hygiene is affected, the possibility of suicides increases, and the effect on morale is tangible. All of these matters affect the occupational health of the officers, especially those who work long term in one prison.
	The Health and Safety Executive recommends that there should be at least one occupational health nurse adviser for every 1,000 employees, and the Prison Service employs about 48,000 people. In 2002 the Prison Service in-house occupational health service had just three such advisers, and occupational health relied largely on the individual governor being interested in finding the money and resources to provide it.
	Since then there have been some improvements in prison occupational health. For example, staff "well days" have been introduced at the young offenders' institution, Glen Parva. These promote good health for prison staff. Included is a blood-pressure check, body fat/weight monitoring, and lung and cholesterol checks. Advice is given about stopping smoking, managing stress, nutrition and healthy eating, and alcohol and drug abuse.
	In the beginning the occupational health adviser at Glen Parva, Violet Chidombwe, had to work from a prison cell because of the lack of space in the prison. However, thanks to the goodwill of enlightened prison governors, in February this year she moved into a dedicated occupational health service unit with secretarial and administrative support. This commitment of the governors has led to a staff therapy room and the employment of a chiropodist. Prison staff can drop into this more central unit. Previously, Violet and her colleagues wasted a lot of time having to visit the staff at their posts, which entailed a lot of locking and unlocking of doors and walking endless corridors. The various actions taken have improved the sickness record at Glen Parva, which has dropped to an average of eight or nine days per officer per year—well below average in the Prison Service overall.
	A further achievement can be seen at Long Lartin, the first prison in the country to receive a special recognition award from the National Clean Air Award scheme. This was given for efforts to protect prisoners and staff from the effects of passive smoking. Since last January smoking has been restricted, following a course on how to stop smoking and the provision of nicotine replacement therapy.
	Since September 2004, standards to be achieved for staff health have been emphasised by the Prison Service. Mandatory requirements now include access to occupational health advice; statutory medical examinations and health checks; setting up and developing an immunisation programme; and procedures for management of occupational health risks, such as stress. These examples illustrate welcome steps forward, but there is still a long way to go, and certainly no room for complacency.
	As the general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, Brian Caton, points out:
	"Prison officers get burnt out—many die in early retirement. Better occupational health provision would help to prevent this happening".
	Mr Caton stresses that better health record keeping is vital. Currently such records are poor. Officers can be exposed to various health hazards affecting prisoners, including hepatitis B and tuberculosis. There are no records of which offenders have been immunised and which have not. This means that a non-immunised officer could be sent to bed-watch a prisoner sick with tuberculosis.
	The POA is calling for centrally kept health records for prison officers and an extension of the best practices on occupational health to cover all establishments. I do not think this is too much to ask for the officers in our prisons, who carry out a vital and difficult job on behalf of us all. I hope the Minister will agree.

Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Hurd for raising this important subject. In making my contribution, I would like to concentrate on the delivery of education and training, especially training, by the Prison Service. In doing so, I must start by declaring an interest: I am the chairman of SEMTA, which is one of the sector skills councils in the engineering sector.
	I fear that my knowledge and understanding of the Prison Service is nothing like as wide as that of many noble Lords, in particular that of my noble friend Lord Hurd. Be that as it may, I hope I can add some insight to this debate from the representations that I have received and give my own support to those urging much-needed reform in this aspect of the Prison Service.
	It is a sad fact that the range of education and training programmes on offer to inmates is inadequate, with less than one-third of prisoners having access to such provision at any one time. The very nature of this provision is disappointing and one might ask whether it is fit for purpose. On the face of it, providing prisoners with education and training opportunities is a worthy aim. But that is insufficient on its own. What is important is the extent to which education and training provision is meaningful in the sense that it brings value to both the individual prisoner and society at large.
	In most instances, the level of education and training on offer to prisoners is limited to the delivery of basic skills and driven by performance targets on basic skills that each prison has to meet. In more and more cases, it would appear that reform is attached to targets and performance. I question whether such an approach achieves genuine reform and real service improvements. Nevertheless, we cannot consider the matter before us without noting the latest report of David Sherlock, the chief inspector of the Adult Learning Inspectorate. Here I must declare another interest—I was until recently a member of the Adult Learning Committee of the Learning and Skills Council.
	In his report, Mr Sherlock observes that more than half of occupational training and education in prisons is inadequate, despite being a major factor in reducing re-offending. He identifies that this is largely a result of longstanding management weaknesses and a slow response to addressing problems which have been so eloquently identified in the past by the reports of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. I was much impressed by the example quoted by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, a few moments ago. Crucially, Mr Sherlock goes on to suggest that education and training are not given sufficient priority because too few heads of learning and skills are on the senior management team or have direct access to the governor.
	Despite the overall patchy provision, we should not lose sight of those institutions that are delivering higher level training. As Mr Sherlock himself observes, there is an increasing number of examples of highly successful local initiatives and excellent work by individual teachers and instructors. For example, I am aware of an approach being taken by the authorities at HMP Wandsworth, aimed at ensuring the training it offers to inmates meets industry standards. As a result, on release, prisoners have an opportunity to be assimilated back into the workforce quickly because they have the skills that employers need and want. I wonder whether the Minister could say whether there are any other schemes of that kind in other prisons around the country?
	The very nature of vocational training is the necessary link with the workplace. However, the opportunities made available to prisoners to undertake workplace training are inevitably very limited. Recent evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee showed that in 2003–04, fewer than 15 per cent of prisoners at that time were employed in prison workshops. However, where prisoners are engaged in useful work which is not of the low-grade, menial variety, there are existing qualifications available that can immediately support training in the prison, with no changes to the nature of the work being done.
	Ensuring adequate assessment and verification is also important. I am pleased to report that my own organisation, SEMTA, has been able to facilitate a link between HMP Wandsworth and the local training to which I have already referred. That provides access to both assessors and verifiers of the highest calibre. The outcome is properly assessed training provision at the industry standard levels. Training provision is driven by the demand for skilled people and logically increases the potential to assimilate individual prisoners back into the community.
	I am concerned about the level of funding made available to the Learning and Skills Council by the Government. I understand that the shortfall has been very substantial recently. Until recently, I was a member of an LSC committee, and I am aware of the concerns expressed. The former director of lifelong learning at the Department for Education and Skills informed the Select Committee on Education and Skills inquiry on prison education that funding,
	"cannot possibly be enough, particularly when you think of the skills gap for the prison population".
	As is well known, the very nature of the prison system does not lend itself to a consistent approach. The need to move people from prison to prison has a marked impact on training provision. That is very regrettable. It is, no doubt, a consequence of an increasing prison population, overcrowded prisons and the reality that many prisons are not equipped with the necessary work-based provision. There is a need for a consistent approach. Many prisoners find themselves unable to continue with their specific training course, in itself a frustrating disappointment for the individual while wasting commitment and resources associated with initial training.
	This issue frustrates and concerns me. People in prison are there because they have failed society. They have committed a crime; as a result, their punishment is the loss of their freedom. Their loss of freedom is a burden not only for the individual prisoner but on the taxpayer, who meets the cost of the imprisonment. We have an additional duty to make best use of that captive audience. If we are failing to provide an education and training service that at least offers prisoners the opportunity of a crime-free future, we have only ourselves to blame.

Lord Addington: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, for introducing this debate and congratulate him on managing to hit a subject that gets the whole House together, singing with virtually the same voice. Whether the Minister will be able to carry on with that, we shall wait and see.
	I wish to declare my interests: I have been associated with the Apex Trust over many years, first as an employee and now as a vice-president, and I am dyslexic. The relevance of the latter is that I wish to concentrate on the role of dyslexia in the education system in prisons, quite simply because there are a lot of dyslexic prisoners. It is reckoned that 51 per cent of prisoners have literacy problems and, according to the most reliable figures that I have seen, about 31 per cent are on the dyslexia spectrum—that is slightly over three times the normal level. That should come as no real surprise given that educational failure is one of the leading guidelines on risk of offending. Also, if you come from a background where schools and educational attainment do not have a high priority, less interest is paid to you and your disability is less likely to be discovered, so it is probably quite natural that a flow-through will occur.
	The consensus built over many years, here and outside, is that the problem with the Government's attitude, with many good intentions coming through, is that dyslexics, due to the nature of the disability, have a different learning pattern. I shall not repeat what I said in yesterday's debate on dyslexia, but the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, confirmed then that the Government pay full attention to the problem and recognise its existence. Thus I assume that there is an inbuilt structure in all the learning programmes in prisons to take account of dyslexia. I hope so, because otherwise they will not work.
	We can talk about basic skills and literacy strategies but the following must be borne in mind. Most offenders are young men, with recent experience of school—an unpleasant experience where you were marked down as the "thicko" because you had problems with literacy. That group will be incredibly difficult to reach. They were the people who kept quiet in class or, more commonly, made a noise at the back, disrupted the class and were sent out. For that group, a teacher at the front of the classroom was to be either hated or feared. How are the Government ensuring that tutors in prisons are trained and given guidance about how to reach that group? Merely repeating a bad experience from a few years ago is a guaranteed way to waste time and money. This group has a disability that manifests itself through slowness in reading and continuous difficulty with writing and spelling. People tend to put emphasis on the ability to read, but many dyslexics can read reasonably well or functionally well; it is writing that is a problem. Will the Government ensure that special provision is made to enable people to undertake further training to tackle that, as the problem with regard to written English will not go away no matter how much tuition is given on it? You may nullify some of the effects, but the problem will always be there.
	What progress has been made in introducing new technology, for example voice recognition technology, and in familiarising some of these groups with it to enable them to transfer information? Without that, they will not be able to access vital work-based training. If you cannot access that kind of training, it does not matter how many times you do a course. Let us embrace the totality of this. Programmes need to be relevant to prisoners. People may talk loftily about literacy skills but prisoners are probably more concerned with getting a job that gives them economic benefit. Most of them will have committed economically related crimes anyway. The failure to create such opportunities forms part of the spiral of offending. Unless we can make training relevant to economic independence, we shall not break the cycle of offending.
	I have about one and a half minutes left in which to speak, which is far too short a time to discuss the rest of the questions that I had prepared. I hope the Minister will give a reply that at least points us towards what the Government are doing to ensure that training is relevant for this very large group within the prison population.

Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, I join noble Lords who have thanked the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, for obtaining this extremely important debate. I declare another interest in that at one time I had the great pleasure of having the daughter of the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, as an extremely able member of my inspection team.
	I share the pleasure felt at the Home Secretary's recent speech. I hope that it does not seem churlish if I appear to be concentrating rather more on shortcomings than on achievements. My purpose is exactly the same as it was when I was Chief Inspector—which was to try to bring about improvements in treatment and conditions. This concerns me no more so than in education. The problems were brought home to me on my very first inspection of Holloway when I discovered that not one of the 450 women inmates received education, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that prison officers would not take them to it.
	I also discovered to my concern that funding was a matter of deep inconsistency because it was decided by governors and area managers who passed cuts on to education. The inconsistency that I remember most concerned the young offender establishment at Brinsford—which contained young offenders and juveniles—which received £482 per year per offender, whereas Thorn Cross, a prison in Cheshire with a similar population, received £2,357. That sort of inconsistency showed me that there was no direction from above. At present the Prison Service average figure is £1,185 per person, which is less than half the equivalent cost for secondary education, which runs at £2,590 a year. I do not like dealing in averages; I would much rather consider the needs of particular sections of the population. I was delighted when the Department for Education and Skills took over responsibility for funding because I remember advising the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, who was the Minister at the time, that the first thing she should do was to undertake a proper needs assessment of each and every prison to ensure that the funding was related to the needs of prisoners and not to the historical accident of the very inefficient Prison Service funding which she had inherited.
	When I look at the needs of the prisoner population, I am minded of the wise caution given by the noble Lord, Lord Hurd of Westwell, about the difference that sometimes exists between reports from officials and realities on the ground. Here is one of them, and I checked these figures this week with the adult learning inspectorate. When I inspected we used to reckon that about 30 per cent, at maximum, of prisoners received education at any one time and that about 80 per cent of all prisoners lacked any form of qualification. Unfortunately, in the Government's response to the House of Commons Education and Skills Committee, those figures have been changed to 39 per cent of prisoners receiving nine hours per week—which is not true, as it includes all the compulsory education for juveniles—and "over half" without qualifications.
	When all of those with a reading level below that of an 11 year-old or numeracy and writing problems are included, and the 75 per cent with mental health problems which include learning difficulties are added, we are left with the fact that virtually all of this population are in the educational special needs category, which is inevitably more expensive. The figures, when added up, show that 50 per cent of all prisoners who lack qualifications are receiving no education at all.
	I am not at all opposed to what the Government propose in delegating responsibilities down to the Learning and Skills Councils. That puts them in line with what is being delivered in the rest of the community and will, I suspect, achieve consistency of education when it eventually gets going. I am, however, concerned about the words in the Learning and Skills Council annual statement of priorities for 2006–07. It says that from 1 August the Learning and Skills Council will be responsible for the planning and funding of offender learning. It will provide a revitalised set of delivery arrangements with a set of high quality providers, charged with delivering a richer and more relevant curriculum to offenders both in custody and the community. Well; hear, hear to that. But how is it going to be delivered?
	I share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, about funding since I find no evidence that funding will be made available. It certainly cannot be expected to come from the Prison Service. That has had to take a cut in order to fund NOMS, while the Home Office has had to take a cut to fund the Prime Minister's responsibility budget. I accept many of the things that the Government said in response to the House of Commons Education and Skills Committee:
	"The Government . . . freely acknowledge that there is much more to do to raise further the standards and outcomes from offender learning services",
	and that,
	"the Government believes that a more comprehensive strategy is needed for education, training and employment within the overarching plan for reducing offending",
	and that,
	"the new service will for the first time bring together the education service with vocational training, in the context of a broader curriculum".
	Hear, hear to all that too. Yet my concerns are that on the ground it does not look like that.
	I declare two particular involvements. First, the Government say in the Offender's Learning Journey that there will be new arrangements for assessment, including potential dyslexia indicators and other learning needs. Those should, then, be clearly linked to a defined entitlement to provision to meet those needs. I found that in young offenders' establishments the best people to help with that were speech and language therapists—the very people who could get to the bottom of why offenders had got to that state. Thanks to the Helen Hamlyn Trust, such speech and language therapists were put into young offenders' establishments for two years. The Government were warned that the funding was going to end, but are still arguing between the Department of Health and the Home Office about who is going to pay. Those young offenders have been denied that assessment. If that is the way that assessment is not being looked after, I wonder how it will be looked after in future.
	I am also concerned about the dismissal as enrichment activities of subjects such as the arts. The arts and higher education are being provided by the voluntary sector; the Prisoners' Education Trust has been mentioned. Yet it is said that the Offender's Learning Journey will have a wide programme including these things. But where are they going to come from? The Government have not indicated how they are going to fund them.
	I am running out of time, yet I am particularly concerned about the impact of all that has been said by the Government. While I agree wholly with the intent, what has been happening on the ground? The Learning and Skills Council itself says that it lacks direction from the Prison Service on what it is to do with and for each type of prisoner. The contracts that have been let are too short to have investment from providers—three years is too short. Who is responsible for the capital development and providing the facilities in prisons such as classrooms? Without classrooms you cannot teach people. Is there any intention to become more flexible, to arrange for working at weekends, nights and in cells?
	As with the development of the National Offender Management Service with which this is linked, there is much that is good in the principle, but the devil is in the detail. I seriously do not feel, from all that I hear from the Learning and Skills Councils, from the heads of learning and skills and from people in prisons, that enough care has been taken to study the implications of providing education for so many of these people with special educational needs. Until those are explored, we will not get a proper answer. I look forward to hearing how the Minister proposes to tackle these problems.

Baroness Gould of Potternewton: My Lords, along with other noble Lords, I would like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, on initiating this important debate. I will concentrate my remarks on the provision of sexual health care in prisons, which the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, touched on in his opening remarks. First, I must declare an interest on three counts—as chair of the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV, president of the FPA, and chair of the Pro-Choice and Sexual Health All-Party Group.
	Offenders tend to have poorer health than the population at large and many of them have led unhealthy lifestyles. They will have had little or no regular contact with health services before coming into prison and, as other noble Lords have said, the prison population reveals strong evidence of health inequalities and social exclusion.
	Sexual activity is not technically legal in prisons. However, the reality is that it is nevertheless widespread and carries with it serious health risks—not least the onward transmission of infection. Those risks must be addressed. Prisons are breeding grounds for blood-borne viruses. They bring together a population with disproportionate rates of high risk behaviour in often overcrowded and adverse conditions.
	The completion of the transfer next April of the management of prison health to primary care trusts provides an opportunity to improve both prison health services and the health, including the sexual health, of prisoners. They will become temporary residents of the PCT where the prison is located and should be provided with treatment, care and support services equivalent to those in the general community. That means—and I trust that this is right—that there will be adequate funding in order to purchase the services from local providers and to provide adequate training for staff to take on the specialist roles.
	Any future strategy also has to take into account that most offenders are in custody for periods of weeks or months rather than years. They are often moved between prisons. It is possible for someone starting treatment for HIV or hepatitis C, to be moved and the treatment stopped because of inconsistency of treatment between prisons. The noble Lord, Lord Hurd, quoted from the recent report published jointly by the National Aids Trust and the Prison Reform Trust. As he said, it identifies that there are significantly higher rates of HIV and hepatitis C in prisons than in the general population.
	In 1997 the Department of Health conducted an anonymous survey of HIV in prisons in England and Wales. That showed a prevalence of 0.3 per cent among adult male prisoners and 1.2 per cent among adult female prisoners, but given the significant increases in HIV cases since 1997—between 6,000 and 7,000 a year compared with fewer than 3,000 in 1997—those prevalence rates are almost certain to be much higher. Is another survey planned?
	All prisoners undergo a health screening on first reception to identify those who have immediate needs or who are at a high risk of having a significant health problem. This may result in individual prisoners requesting an appointment with the sexual health service, but the quality of service is erratic. The current level of service does not do enough to support prevention and harm minimisation, leaving prisoners vulnerable to infection. It is imperative that a best practice framework be agreed for all prisons, and each prison should have a policy on HIV and hepatitis C which conforms to that framework and which is effectively communicated to all staff and prisoners.
	While HM Prison Service has policies on HIV and hepatitis C which acknowledge that sexual activity occurs in prisons, it denies the need for condoms and the protection they offer. Prison doctors were advised in 1995 that they should make condoms available to individual prisoners on application if, in their clinical judgment, there was a risk of transmission of HIV infection during sexual activity. Despite this, current policy and practice on condom provision varies greatly from prison to prison. Sometimes it can be good, but that is mostly not the case.
	Recently, I asked my noble friend Lady Scotland of Asthal whether the review being undertaken on the prison health service would clarify the policy on condom provision. In reply, my noble friend indicated that guidance would clarify the policy on condoms, so that it could apply more consistently across the prison estate. While that is fine as far as it goes, the guidance should go further, purely for health reasons, by indicating that condoms should be made available, anonymously, to all prisoners who need them.
	There are other prison services in this health area that need examination and improvement. GUM services in prison are often run in isolation from other social care services in the wider population. There should be more integrated services, with linkage to organisations such as NACRO and community workers. It is also true that the prison GUM services, where available, are often led by a doctor or clinician still linked to "old style" technology. Services need to be modernised and nurse-led, with a model of testing clinics and separate treatment clinics so that resources can be used most effectively. The time for undertaking this work must be seen as protected time, and not as an add-on role for those involved.
	In conclusion, the following actions are essential to improve sexual health care in prisons. There should be a framework of standards to support all services in all prisons, to provide consistency of quality. Confidentiality issues should be addressed robustly. Tests should be minimally invasive and have a fast turnaround time. Condoms should be made available anonymously to those who need them. Importantly, all uniformed and healthcare staff should receive appropriate training so that they can support the client effectively, and in a sensitive and supportive way.
	Prisons are failing in their responsibilities to ensure that both prisoners and staff receive adequate information, education and understanding of the risk of transmission, and the need for proper sexual health care. The Government's programme for action to tackle health inequalities recognises that prison is an important setting for health promotion activities, including sexual health. They should therefore be providing guidance and support, not only for prisoners to remain healthy in the prison environment, but to protect and improve their health, and that of their partners and families after release.
	I sincerely trust that we will hear from the Minister that the new regulations and guidance which are to be issued will do just that.

Lord Lucas: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hurd of Westwell for giving us the opportunity to have this debate. I must declare an interest: I have a close association with Safeground, a charity involved in prison education.
	I have been enormously cheered up by some of the speeches I have heard today. I am a sucker for good news stories in this area. The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and his forklift trucks were, I thought, a particularly good initiative, because that is an industry where prisoners can find easy employment. To learn what the rest of industry is doing to focus on the need to make jobs available to these people, I find very encouraging.
	What lifted my heart most was the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, and his exposition of what the Home Secretary had said. It occurred to me that maybe we will find a mirror in history here and, just as this Government have for the past eight years pursued the policies of the last Conservative Home Secretary, perhaps the next administration will pursue the policies of the last Labour Home Secretary.
	Reality, however, dawns. Listening to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, of course, one is brought firmly down to earth: how is all this going to be delivered? Currently, we are in a mess. The whole prison education initiative of taking it over to the DfES, for which I had great hopes at the time, has failed. I do not blame the Government for this. We might well have tried the same thing ourselves, but it has not worked. Education has diminished in status within the prison system; it has become harder to keep prisoners on hold; it has become harder to command space for education; it has become harder to get prison officers to bring prisoners to education on time. The status of education within the prison system is important, and by having it exported to this other ministry, that has declined.
	The body within the DfES which has been charged with prison education, OLSU, is largely staffed by people with no experience of prison. There are senior employees there, of several years' standing, who have not yet been into a prison, let alone made regular arrangements for familiarising themselves with what actually happens. The gap between theory and reality has been allowed to widen. Perhaps as a result of that, much of the extra money allocated to prison education has been spent on bureaucracy and on people to manage education, rather than on delivery. The great project to reform prison education was presciently named RECS, and has now been consigned to oblivion. OLSU has been reduced to a policy-only department, which as the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, I am sure will agree, is a disaster. What we are talking about is the need for integrated delivery. Delivery is all-important and to imagine that you can separate, for prison purposes, policy and delivery is, I think, a grave mistake.
	The emphasis on targets, as my noble friend Lord Trefgarne said—I must disagree with my noble friend Lord Hurd—has produced figures that are 40 per cent higher, but I do not begin to believe them. They are so little checked and there are so many opportunities for massaging the figures. If organisations as honourable, straightforward and open as hospitals can learn to massage figures, prisons certainly can. Prisoners are taking courses they do not need; prisoners are taking the same course twice; prisoners are taking courses and being given awards they never receive. My judgment would be that there has, on the whole, been no improvement whatever.
	As my noble friend Lord Trefgarne said, there is the big question of whether what is being given to these prisoners is fit for purpose anyway. Is it the education they need to take them forward into life outside, or is it just a set of qualifications designed for other people in other circumstances—people who are already well settled in society but need to improve their skills and abilities? Turning back to what the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, said, the hope must lie in really assessing what prisoners need; that must be the focus for taking this forward. What do prisoners actually need? What skills do they need? What motivations do we have to instil in them? What relationships with people and organisations outside do we have to build, and how will we do that?
	Education has to be moved back into the prison service. It has to be given the status it ought always to have had, with a board member—which education never previously had when it was within the Prison Service—and close links with prison industries and the learning and skills councils. That is a good place for much of the organisation of educational delivery, because you do not want to duplicate that within the Prison Service. However, the learning and skills councils do not know about prisons; the qualifications they have to hand are not designed for prisoners; the sets of motivations, which they are used to applying to FE colleges, really carry a great danger of distorting the whole delivery of education, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, indicated, to a point where what they have on offer just is not what prisoners require. This must be a process driven by prisoner requirements.
	I see a hope for this. I think the core for it must be to place in this House the Minister with responsibility for prisons and give him a mandate for five years. I hope that this is something we will do, should we return to government. It is a difficult area: there is a great deal to do; a lot of knowledge, consistency and drive are required, and it is very difficult to get that when the Minister and those responsible for other aspects of prisons are junior Ministers, ever intent on moving on, ever intent on doing something else. That is why, in my experience, we got the BSE crisis wrong. It was because the Minister for agriculture was always desperate to be a Minister for something else. He never paid attention to this ticking time bomb and just hoped that it would explode on someone else's watch.
	If we are going to improve prisons, we have to employ really long-term treatment, and that policy should apply elsewhere in the Prison Service. The idea that governors can do good in a prison when they switch from one prison to another within two years is ridiculous. You would never place your child in a school which did that with its headmasters, so why on earth should we place prisoners in prisons where the management structure is so evanescent?

Lord Roberts of Llandudno: My Lords, I shall not venture to forecast what a Liberal Democrat Home Secretary might do. The Conservative Party seems to be very willing to do that today. We congratulate the new leader of the party and we shall see what happens in the future.
	I am concerned about young people in prison and especially about the mental health of young people before they go into secure accommodation or ordinary prison. Last week, the High Court discussed the death of a 16 year-old from north Wales—Joseph Scholes—who was living in a children's home in Sale, Cheshire. He was described by a specialist in adolescent psychiatry as suffering from a conduct disorder with possible morbid depressive illness, and he was a very vulnerable child. Joseph was just nine days into a two-year sentence at Stoke Heath young offender institution in Shropshire when, as a 16 year-old boy, he hanged himself. Two weeks before he was sentenced, he slashed his face more than 30 times. Nevertheless, he was committed to a young offender institution and not to a secure children's home. A lack of resources and places meant that he was denied the support which could have been provided in a secure home and which could have saved his life.
	As one of the "vulnerable children", Joseph is not alone in being locked up in unsafe penal institutions. His Queen's Counsel in the High Court said:
	"There is overwhelming evidence that the circumstances in which Joseph came to be detained in Stoke Heath Young Offender Institution exemplify a chronic, systematic problem rather than an isolated, individual aberration".
	I ask the Minister to give the most serious consideration to a sentencing regime which embraces both sentencing policy and the conditions under which sentences are served and which repeatedly causes vulnerable children to be locked up in unsafe institutions. Are the Government meeting their obligations under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to life?
	I have here a list of the names of youngsters—29 of them in all—who have taken their lives over the past 15 years. I am sure that the Minister has access to it. They include kids of the ages of 14 and 15 who have been imprisoned and have been unable to face the future in these institutions. We have to consider that and ask whether we are really meeting our obligations.
	Just as unsatisfactory is the imprisonment of young people under the age of 18 in adult prisons. I have only the figures for the year 2000. Fifteen youngsters under the age of 18 were in Holloway prison; 10 were in Eastwood Park; and 12 were in New Hall. All told, the total in English prisons came to 159. In Scotland—in Aberdeen, Inverness and Kilmarnock—youngsters served their sentences in adult prisons. As I said, 29 children have died in UK prisons since 1990. I am told that this year two boys have already died in prison. A study in the Lancet on 15 September states that children in prisons are 18 times more likely to commit suicide than those of the same age group in the community.
	I shall now return to a matter on which I have pressed the Minister a number of times. Article 17 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is not being fully implemented by Her Majesty's Government. When the convention was signed way back in 1991, the United Kingdom reserved the right to house children with adult offenders. Fourteen years later, young lives are being lost because of that reservation. I urge the Government to implement immediately the full convention. On 19 October, I asked a Question in this House and the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, assured me that,
	"in the medium term, we hope to be able to withdraw the reservation about custody and accommodation".—[Official Report, 19/10/05; col. 747.]
	I ask the Minister this afternoon to assure us that that is taking place.

Lord Rosser: My Lords, I add my words of appreciation to those already expressed to the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, for initiating this debate. His commitment, compassion and expertise in this field are widely acknowledged and respected. Before I proceed any further, I declare my involvement with the Prison Service as chair of its audit committee and as a non-executive member of the change programme board.
	Many measures can contribute to safer prisons for both staff and prisoners, and they can contribute to reducing re-offending. Education and health are two such measures. Research has confirmed the high levels of vulnerability in the current prison population, including high rates of previous self-harm, mental illness and drug misuse. The need and the objective that is being pursued is to put in place comprehensive mental health services for prisoners, ensuring that mental health services are delivered to NHS standards; to have comprehensive and effective substance misuse services for prisoners; and to continue to develop better primary care services in prisons and better public health services for prisoners. To achieve that objective in full will require still further financial resources, as well as ensuring that the prison health service workforce is appropriately trained in line with appropriate professional standards and competences.
	Other research evidence confirms the importance of time out of cells and of purposeful activity being provided, of which education is a part. The closer working arrangements and involvement with the Department for Education and Skills and the Learning and Skills Council are developing further the work already done in prisons on the basic skills of literacy, language and numeracy and employment-related skills that employers will recognise and value. The Learning and Skills Council has made offenders' learning and skills one of its key priorities, which should allow offenders access to a greater range of mainstream LSC-funded provision. It should also help to integrate the provision of learning and skills services in prisons with those for offenders in the community, and they should be funded alongside the general post-16 education responsibilities by the Learning and Skills Council.
	Acquiring the necessary skills to secure a job when a prison sentence has been completed should also contribute to reducing re-offending, since lack of money or meaningful activity on leaving prison is one of the factors that we all know can lead to re-offending. Local employers who are able to identify local skills gaps and support training and interventions to get ex-offenders into jobs are of major assistance. Likewise, effective health services in prison contribute to reducing re-offending, since programmes that address drug and mental health problems can remove factors that may have been both the cause of offending and the difficulty in securing and holding down a job.
	Considerable progress has been made in recent years, as has been said, with significant additional financial resources being put into rehabilitation regimes in prisons. The number of basic skills awards each year has risen over the past seven years from 13,000 to 73,000. Over 30,000 offenders were released from prison last year with an education, employment or training place to go to. There has been a major increase in the financial resources directed to offender healthcare services. Far more drug users are also now being treated in prison. The last financial year saw some 60,000 engaging with clinical services and 5,000 completing intensive drug rehabilitation programmes. To maximise the prospects of it being fully effective, such help, including as the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, reminded us, for alcohol misuse, has to become a fully integrated process that bridges the move back from custody to the community.
	The changes in education and health provision that have been made and are planned should help to ensure that those services are delivered as part of the service provision in the area in which each prison is located and help to reduce perceptions that prisons are insular communities. The Prison Service has undergone considerable change that has already led to significant improvements in both education and healthcare. It will be important to ensure in the further changes that lie ahead for the Prison Service that not only are the improvements already achieved sustained but that, as intended, they are further developed and expanded and do have a favourable impact on re-offending levels.
	The new partnership with the National Health Service which is being forged to ensure that a similar standard of care can be provided within prisons to that provided in the remainder of the health service is a welcome development. The intention is that all public sector prison health services will have become the responsibility of primary care trusts during the course of next year.
	With the proposed impending change in the role of the primary care trusts it will be vital to ensure that any future changes in structure and provision do not adversely affect the improved level of health provision and care in prisons which the existing partnership with the National Health Service is offering. A lengthened chain between the Prison Service and those contracted to provide health services in prison would mean a change in relationships including those with the primary care trusts. Considerable attention may be needed in this situation to ensure that effective partnership working and quality of provision remains the reality as well as the theory.
	Finally, the subject of the debate is education and health in prisons. Most of those on probation case loads and in prisons are offenders who have repeatedly re-offended and been reconvicted. Eighty per cent of adult male prisoners have previous convictions and about two-thirds have been in prison before. Repeat offenders often have long-lasting and deep-seated problems such as drug misuse, are educational drop outs, have poor literary skills, and suffer homelessness and unemployment. Offending is not a result of social problems; it involves a choice by the individual to go down that road. However, as my noble friend Lord Filkin said, the current rates of re-offending suggest that despite much hard work by all concerned we have not been particularly successful in addressing the issue and the problems faced by many repeat offenders.
	Although the debate is about prisons, it is, as many noble Lords have said, not simply what happens in prisons that matters. The developments which have taken place recently in education and health provision and which still have some considerable way to go are designed to ensure that in those fields prisons are not regarded as separate silos but as part of the provision of those services to the community as a whole. What happens to prisoners once they leave prison—the need for continuing support and provision for them in the fields of health and education—is crucial.
	The principle of a clear and seamless linkage in the support for offenders moving from prison back into the community through the provision of a wide range of relevant services and support from potentially a large number of different specialist sources is a crucial part of the changes in the structure and organisation of offender management which no doubt will be debated at some length in your Lordships' House in the future. The key objective of those changes is to reduce re-offending and achieve the goals in that regard because current levels of re-offending are far too high. If that objective can be achieved over a period of time—I agree fully with the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, that it is outcomes which count—it will be of benefit not only to offenders but, more importantly, to the safety and quality of life of the community as a whole.

Lord Elton: My Lords, my noble friend scarcely needs my thanks and admiration but I add them to the harvest that he has received during the debate. Outside the terms of the debate, I endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, said about juveniles in adult prisons. It was an acute problem when I was Minister for the Prison Service which we, I think, briefly cracked. However, the population has enormously exploded since then, as has the number of juveniles. It remains utterly unacceptable that children should be put into adult prisons. There is no other way to describe it: it is a scandal.
	If one takes a bird's eye view of the Prison Service, one of the surprises is the mobility of the population. One thinks of prisons as anchored, solid fortresses with their complement of occupants. In fact there is a great web of movement throughout; and the more crowded the prisons are the more frequent the moves seem to be. That has its implications on how prisoners are treated, in particular as regards health and education. Therefore, I regard with some anxiety the present reorganisation of the provision of education. Indeed, any reorganisation tends to interfere with education. But I think that I am right in saying that we are faced with three development regions and six developing regions; and that overall they will have one national curriculum but will be in charge of their own methods of delivery locally contracted out. With a mobile population, that means that prisoners will go from one system to another with no continuity of delivery. One programme may advance one subject ahead of another, and the prisoner may simply arrive at the wrong stage.
	There is another complication. I was deeply disturbed by what my noble friend said about the frequency of loss of records. If a prisoner who is not all that organised to look after his own affairs arrives in a strange community with strange cellmates, strange prison officers and a new teacher and is asked where he is on his offender's learning journey, the answer will be that he is lost. He will have to start again. Therefore, a reliable system of documentation is essential. If this is a journey, the documentation should be a passport which should travel with him and be marked up, just as a soldier's pay book used to be marked up with his record of service. It should start with an accurate assessment in which there should be provision—as has been suggested, though not in this debate—for a note of any disability of sight or hearing, as well dyslexia, because either of those two first conditions can seriously handicap a learning process and add to the frustration that quite possibly brought the young person into offending in the first place. If that is not rectified, the person will be back as sure as eggs is eggs.
	The next thing that is necessary is a plan which has to be devised to fit the individual on the journey. That must accompany him with his passport. If this all sounds too difficult, remember that every day we manage to get 2,000 to 3,000 prisoners out of prison and into court and back again with the right documentation or they could not be tried. So I do not think it is beyond the system to provide. With juveniles, it is also essential to connect—and this is asking more of the service—with the school from which he came and, before return, with the school to which he is returning. The same should be said of young adults if they are in any form of education. Otherwise again you get this discontinuity, and what most of these young people lack is continuity of any form in their lives.
	The next thing is the availably of the prisoners. In my day—which, thankfully, is long gone, and no doubt things are better—a very considerable bar to education was not the lack of teachers or indeed of classrooms, to which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, drew attention, but the fact that prisoners could not be conveyed from cell to classroom and back. I understand that that persists. It is interesting then to notice that the hours of purposeful activity out of the cell between 1992 and 2003, which is the span of figures I have, have diminished, on average, by 1.1 hours a week, from 23.7 to 22.6. Averages are misleading things, and I am afraid that these figures go to only 2001, but I was sorry to see that where you think the need was most desperate—that is, closed training dispersal prisons—the time out of cell per week on a weekday was 6.5 hours in 2000 and 9.2 hours, which is better, in 2001, dropping at the weekends to 4.8 hours and 7.5. That was the lowest end of the adult scale. The best was 16.2 and 17.1 in open training prisons. The figures are in tables that your Lordships can see. There are also variations between prisons. I suppose it is not surprising that in a local prison such as Brixton, which is really a clearing house, the hours are down to 7.2 and 5.4, whereas Albany, which has a pretty static population, has averages of 9.5 hours for weekdays and 7.7 hours for weekends. In Nottingham it is 7.1 and 3.7. Other prisons go up as high as 15 hours, so it is not all black.
	Something has to be done to enable the students and the teachers to come together. When they cannot, the answer—and it is a brilliant answer—is distance learning. My noble friend has referred to that in his opening speech. In the 30 seconds left to me, I can only commend that as a means that must be taken on board and encouraged to overcome the other difficulties that will take several years to put right, if they do not take a generation.

Baroness Howells of St Davids: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Hurd of Westwell, for raising the debate. It has been said many times that much has been done by the Government but that much still needs to be done. I would like to deal especially with the black and minority communities where much still needs to be done, especially for those with mental health problems. The black prison population now exceeds that of the national average, and more than 25 per cent have a mental illness. Since the closure of the mental health hospitals in my area a number of people can be seen roaming the streets of Charlton and Woolwich, and I am told that that is repeated in other boroughs in London. These are disturbed people released from care without adequate provision and support. Their only hope of help is to commit a crime and be arrested.
	In the Guardian on Wednesday, Professor Kamlesh Patel in his research, "Counting on Change", said:
	"African Caribbean patients are twice as likely to be referred through the courts, and black Africans are twice as likely to be referred through the police".
	It is also said that these groups are more likely to experience incidences of physical restraint, leading to death in some cases such as those of Rocky Bennch and Young Sylvester. Even in prison as it now operates there is no direct provision for the mentally ill. The Government may inadvertently support such a scenario by not including NHS provision as part of prison services. Prison officers are not psychiatrists and tend to seek the least attractive solution by over-sedation. This is not to blame the officers but to point out the difficulties of getting appropriate psychiatric help for the prison population as a whole.
	I have it on good authority that it takes about six to eight months to get a psychiatrist to see a suspected mentally disturbed person. There may be good reasons for that, but mental illness is such that unless a person is treated, he will deteriorate, and for his own safety he is often isolated from the rest of the prison population. There has been a continually rising number of suicides in prison by persons who are later described as mentally ill. That causes much pain to relatives and the community who may then wrongly accuse prison officers of murdering those in their care. It is almost impossible to get to the bottom of such cases after such an accusation and for the family the death remains a mystery and causes great concern.
	Experience has shown that where suitable homes and voluntary projects that are culturally sensitive exist, persons so labelled can be helped to manage their condition when maintained by good diagnosis and adequate supervision. Often those patients can function well, hold down a job, and they cease to be a burden on society. The Government's commitment to inclusiveness cannot be limited to reducing poverty. They must take on board both health and education, especially for those in that position. The Labour Party's slogan, "Healthcare at the point of need", does not appear to reach those who are mentally ill when incarcerated. Perhaps I may persuade the Government, through the Minister, to consider whether at least 300 beds with a proper psychiatric team would offer a better service to our unfortunate citizens. If the Government established a properly staffed and culturally sensitive facility, a brighter future would be offered for many of the disturbed persons in our prisons.
	Unlike Professor Patel, who is asking for further research, I believe that the African-Caribbean community has "research fatigue". Will the Government make NHS provision available to those in our society who are deemed to be a danger to others and to themselves? No one in this Chamber can say with conviction that mental health will not affect us. Whether we call it dementia, Alzheimer's, bipolar affective disorder or personality disorder due to drugs, we are all very vulnerable. The word "crazy" is no longer used, but that should not stop the House from realising the cost to the taxpayer if citizens with mental health problems continue to be imprisoned without appropriate care. No one will disagree that they are part of society and need to be treated as favourably as others, no matter what the colour of their skin.
	Other noble Lords have already given considerable data to back their arguments. I trust that the realism of what I have said will help to underpin what has already been said. The real case is for the NHS to be a part of our prison system—not tomorrow and not later but right now. Education alone must not be seen as the only way forward.

Lord Dholakia: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Hurd of Westwell, for this debate. The noble Lord has had a distinguished career, including occupying that great office of Secretary of State for the Home Department. I well recollect his days at the Home Office, when we saw some remarkable initiatives and reforms in our criminal justice system. For that reason, we should take serious note of what he said in this debate. I also thank all noble Lords who have set a precedent of being constructive, but with an occasional sting in the tail. I intend to maintain that trend.
	Over the years, many reforms have been lost. There cannot be any dispute that with a prison population of nearly 76,000 inmates, there is little scope for more purposeful activities—a point so often made by Martin Narey, the former prison director. I have often said that there has been little concerted effort to argue the case to the public for a more sparing use of imprisonment and a greater use of punishment in the community. We need to change that culture. We need to see that prisons are not the ultimate solution to all society's ills. We want the Home Secretary and other Ministers to produce a more balanced climate by highlighting the case for a more rigorous use of constructive community sentences instead of prison. In the absence of such a drive, the prison population continues to increase steadily. As long as that continues, prison reforms are likely to suffer.
	Today's debate identifies two distinct areas of concern—prison education and health. I shall concentrate my remarks on prison education, which has the potential to play a key role in diverting offenders from crime. One recent research study found that offenders who had gained qualifications as a result of educational programmes were reconvicted at only one-third of the rate of similar offenders who had not received educational help. It is well known that around 60 per cent of prisoners lack basic skills, which rules them out of around 96 per cent of new jobs.
	At the other end of the spectrum there is a group of very able and intelligent prisoners. Some may not agree with me, but frequently their criminal activity demonstrates that they have intelligence, drive, resourcefulness and the ability to plan and to lead other people—qualities that in other contexts would be seen as admirable, but which have been misused by being deployed in crime. Over the years, my own organisation, NACRO, has seen many examples of such serious offenders who have gained higher education qualifications, which have enabled them to achieve positive, law-abiding roles in society. I declare my interest here—I preside over this organisation.
	Between these ends of the spectrum are many prisoners whose ability to gain employment and lead law-abiding lives can be enhanced if they can gain educational qualifications according to their abilities. Since the later 1990s, the Prisons Service has concentrated its educational resources on basic skills education. This has produced some highly impressive results. It is an extremely creditable achievement that 10 per cent of those who achieve basic skills education qualifications nationally are prisoners. However, the concentration on basic skills has all too often been at the cost of less emphasis on many other aspects of prison education.
	Prisoner education opportunities need to be comprehensive, and to include adequate opportunities to engage in a wide range of courses, including courses and activities relating to the arts and opportunities for further and higher education qualification. Some prisons have a remarkable record for inviting artists and writers in residence, who assist prisoners to develop these types of skill. Basic skills alone are often not enough to enable offenders to get jobs, and need to be supplemented with opportunities to develop specific vocational skills. It is also clear that a wider curriculum—including arts-based activities—can often be the key to engaging in learning for prisoners who might not otherwise be attracted to education.
	I recommend a recipe of six priorities for developing prison education. First, the assessment system for prisoners' educational needs must be dramatically improved. Too often in recent years we have seen far too rudimentary an approach, exclusively biased towards basic skills assessment. Secondly, a more comprehensive range of educational courses and opportunities must be developed to ensure that prisoners at all levels of educational ability can receive opportunities appropriate to their particular needs.
	Thirdly, particular attention needs to be paid to young adult offenders aged 18 to 20. Provision for those under 18 has improved significantly as a result of the additional resources which the Youth Justice Board has devoted to custodial regimes for this age group. It cannot be right that the provision for 18 year-olds should be so dramatically worse than that available to 17 year-olds—particularly as young adult offenders also have high reoffending rates. Around two-thirds of them are reconvicted within two years of leaving custody.
	Fourthly, the Government should reconsider their rejection of the proposal made last year by the Select Committee on Education and Skills for the appointment of special needs co-ordinators in every prison. Special needs co-ordinators have significantly improved the education provided to juveniles with special needs in young offender institutions and similar appointments could do the same in adult establishments.
	The fifth point is a sticky one: pay for prisoners. Those prisoners engaged in education should receive the same level of pay as those who participate in workshops, so there is no disincentive to learn.
	The sixth point, and the most important of all, is one I made earlier: the Government must strongly, repeatedly and robustly argue the case to the public and sentencers for a reduction in the use of prison sentences. Much of the additional money provided for prison education in recent years has been cancelled out by the large increase in the prison population over the past decade. The result of that, according to estimates by the Forum on Prison Education, is that only about 30 per cent of prisoners overall are involved in education of any kind.
	Prison overcrowding means that all too often prisoners are denied the chance of education, or have courses disrupted because they are transferred to another prison at short notice as governors are desperately struggling to accommodate excessive numbers of prisoners received from the courts.
	These six proposals should be implemented with determination as an integral part of the new Offenders' Learning and Skills Unit's strategy for the development of offenders' education. Their combined effect would make a major difference to prisoners' prospects for leading law-abiding lives on release, and thereby increase the safety of the whole community. That, after all, is the objective of all our penal institutions, and what we should strive to achieve.

The Earl of Listowel: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, does he share the serious concern of the Youth Justice Board that the secure estate is now operating at around 97.5 per cent capacity for under-18s?

Lord Dholakia: My Lords, I am sure that is the truth, and I share that concern.

Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Hurd of Westwell for introducing this important, timely debate, given—I hope and trust—the imminent arrival of the Green Paper.
	I hope noble Lords will forgive me if I do not refer to all the powerful speeches that have been made in your Lordships' House today, because I have rather a lot I want to say in the restricted time allowed. In the main I will focus my remarks on education, but of course education and health go together.
	The primary roles of prisons in the criminal justice system are punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation and the protection of the public, but this must incorporate the development of learning and skills. Qualifications provide a direct recognition of work and effort, which can build self-esteem. In addition, confidence and social skills are needed to make all this worthwhile. An overall package must be provided.
	Why is reoffending so high? Prisons are overcrowded. On 31 July this year the prison population was over 77,000—2 per cent more than last year's 76,500. This is the highest ever recorded figure. Fully 61 per cent of prisoners are reconvicted within two years of being released. We must not underestimate the potential role that good prison education can provide to prevent reoffending.
	The current situation is grim. The House of Commons Education and Skills Committee's prison education report, published in March, was damning of the Government's failure to implement an overarching strategy. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, asked, what is really happening on the ground?
	I recently visited Brixton Prison and saw first-hand the excellent work being carried out by the governor and the head of learning and skills. There is real commitment among the staff I spoke to. They want to get results and see the system actually enhance progress, not hinder it. There is a high turnover of staff across the prison system. Governors are moved from prison to prison. This is massively disruptive. As my noble friend Lord Lucas asked, would the Minister send her children to a school where the headmaster rotates every two years?
	Will the Government seriously consider developing a solid career structure allowing progression within the Prison Service and imposing a fixed minimum term for a prison governor to remain in each post? Heads of learning and skills must be integrated into the system. The Offenders' Learning and Skills Unit is apparently directing their policy and funding. This is not clearly done. They must be given the opportunity to plan for the long term, and not to meet the latest Whitehall target.
	Are Government targets for prisons realistic? We must focus on outcomes rather than outputs if we are to see less reoffending. Are key performance indicators focusing on the right areas? The layers of bureaucracy that exist are seriously hindering innovative development in offender education.
	The noble Lord, Lord Dearing, recently made an excellent reference in your Lordships' House to the consequences of the bureaucratic machine. He said,
	"Part of the problem of bureaucracy arises because those who distribute public money may be more concerned to avoid transgressing the constraints than to achieve the policy objectives".—[Official Report, 24/11/05; col. 1749.]
	This is so true of the prison system.
	Like governors, prisoners are moved from prison to prison. How can education providers meet qualification needs with such inconsistency? There is a severe knock-on effect from this disruptive approach for the prisoners and the community. There are numerous funding streams and constant bids are demanded at short notice. There is very little long-term strategic thinking. Rather than prison education being a bolt-on to the Learning and Skills Council, the Government must join funding and policy. The Offenders' Learning and Skills Unit deals with policy and does not control funding. There is not strategic thinking in the provision of education and there is no national funding for what are seen as softer skills.
	Even providing an individual with qualifications alone is not enough in the fight to reduce reoffending. This must be coupled with structured learning so that prisoners can develop their ability to communicate and interact. This requires collective learning, group work and social skills—skills necessary in the community.
	Will the Minister confirm that the proposed restructuring of probation ensures prison and community education and health will now provide a more coherent approach? The movement of prisoners into the community must be done properly and the transition must be managed. What measures are in place to provide NOMS with better resources to achieve this? Support and provision must be provided in the community. Forging links with local employers is difficult, but essential. Let us be honest: businesses are terrified of employing convicts. However, a significant proportion of the whole population of the UK has a criminal conviction.
	Offenders need to be equipped with skill trades such as bricklaying, plumbing, carpentry, tiling, and IT, in which they can make an honest living with a salary which stands a chance of rivalling an income from drug crime. With the Olympics on the way, there certainly would not be a shortage of jobs requiring skilled labour.
	It is promising to see the Skills Minister is committed to,
	"Employers engaging with the prison service, providing training while people are in prison and then guaranteeing them a job at the end of it".
	Let us hope that this becomes more than just lip service and the Government really will facilitate this in a structured programme with adequate funding. Will the Minister confirm that this is not overlooked and that practical measures are in place to facilitate structured funding, including support in the community for institutionalised individuals?
	We have already heard this evening that many offenders suffer from dyslexia and other special educational needs. Recent research shows that 20 per cent of the prison population has hidden disabilities—twice as many as we would expect in the average population. In addition to this, primary mental healthcare facilities need to be developed in our prisons as part of a package for offenders, many of whom suffer from serious mental health problems. These must be assessed properly and treated accordingly. Disabilities have a profound effect on the development of offenders' skills. Can the Minister confirm that the Green Paper will include reference to special educational needs and mental health?
	The Adult Learning Inspectorate judged 60 per cent of prison education as unacceptable. It recommends that prison education must meet external standards. This must progress. However, we must make sure that we get the fundamentals right: prison education cannot just replicate the conventional system.
	Prisoners are socially excluded individuals. The recent Social Exclusion Unit research provides disturbing reading. 30 per cent of offenders are homeless before prison; 46 per cent have long-standing illness; half do not have a GP; 43 per cent lose family links; and 67 per cent are jobless before prison.
	We have seen how grave the situation is. A prisoner who suffers from serious emotional problems, who cannot maintain or form relationships, who has learning difficulties, mental health problems and a drug addiction, cannot simply be provided with education that we find in a college. No, prison education must go further. In short, it must start at the beginning. It must deal with the emotional and social problems facing offenders and then move on to qualifications and employable skills. The two go hand in hand.
	The voluntary sector has been making significant advances in the development of prisoners' emotional and interpersonal skills. The use of the arts and drama, for which there is no LSC funding, can make an enormous difference. One such project is the charity Safe Ground, which gives parents in prison an opportunity to develop some elementary means to connect with, understand and build a relationship with their children. That in turn helps them to feel a sense of self-worth, responsibility, ownership and empowerment—all crucial steps if they are to have a chance of becoming a part of their family and, it is to be hoped, their neighbourhood or community. It gives them simple stepping stones. Targets for external qualifications alone do not recognise some of the difficulties that those people face. External qualifications are not the panacea, but life skills can be.
	Why, oh why, when so much money and effort is expended in that direction, is it the voluntary sector that, thank goodness, delivers? Why do government effort and Prison Service commitment continue to fail? What about the structure of the Prison Service? Unless it works, all the fantastic effort put in by those on the ground who work in our prisons, as opposed to those crafting policy in government offices, will never succeed in repairing the damage that those people have endured and their victims and society have suffered.
	To institutionalise individuals and then send them into an unstructured and potentially volatile environment, without the requisite skills required to integrate into a civilised community, is counterproductive. A coherent and consistent strategy is required for prisons which integrates applicable education and skills combined with solid primary mental and physical healthcare. That needs to be provided inside prisons and in the community. The transition from the secure environment of prison to the streets must be managed effectively.
	Does the Minister recognise the direct link between good education in prisons and a reduction in reoffending? If so, let us see the Government show courage and drive the need for strategic thinking and coherent action. After all, prisoners want to learn, prison and college staff want to teach and mentor; and the voluntary sector wants to provide support and time. The Government must show appreciation for the efforts that people are making and the importance of the issue, and co-ordinate prison education as part of a coherent strategy so that we can reduce reoffending.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I wish to say to the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, how much pleasure this debate has given me. We have heard from all Benches the same call for strategic thinking, joined-up working and involvement of all sectors of the community—the corporate sector, the civic sector, the faith and voluntary sectors—working together to meet the individual needs of offenders to reduce the risk of re-offending. The speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, gave me particular pleasure because she speaks from the Front Bench and therefore for her party. If we have on this occasion a unity of purpose and direction, if I may respectfully say so, it bodes well for the future. That voice was ably added to by the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, who spoke powerfully for the Liberal Democrat Benches. I must say that I have become used to having the wholehearted support of the Liberal Democrat Benches on this agenda but I am warmed indeed to have that of noble Lords representing Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Long may that remain so, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.
	I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, wholeheartedly on giving us the privilege of discussing these very important issues. In doing so he has enabled this House to continue to discuss two of the vital elements that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary included in his powerful speech to the Prison Reform Trust, with which the noble Lord has long been associated. I thank noble Lords who complimented the nature and quality of that speech, not least my noble friend Lord Filkin. The speech sets out the direction and intent of the Government, the Home Secretary and the Home Office team.
	My right honourable friend made clear then that health and education are key in helping to ensure that those who leave prison do so equipped to participate more fully in society and in helping to break the cycle of offending. I cannot tell the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, how much I agreed with him when he said that offenders are sentenced to loss of liberty but not to loss of hope. We have to keep that flicker of hope alive so that it can burst into flame when they return to take their part in communities—we hope in a better form. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that the Government understand the importance of the role played by the Prisons Minister. As I now am the Prisons Minister, I assure him of my wholehearted commitment to this agenda.
	I hope that I will be able to cheer the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, up and persuade him that the general lifting of his spirit that took place when my noble friend Lord Filkin was speaking is merited. We have made good progress in fulfilling the 2001 manifesto commitment to increase dramatically the quality and quantity of education provision in prisons. Indeed, we have gone beyond that by including a new focus on those under supervision in the probation service. The noble Lord, Lord Hurd, was right to say that things had improved and that he had confidence in the service. He is right to have such confidence. Education in prisons has achieved a great deal over recent years. Those achievements go beyond what many of us would have thought possible. Since 2001, the number of basic skills awards achieved in prisons has more than doubled from 25,300 to 63,547 in 2004–05. Nearly 16,000 of the latter were achieved at level two—a level that demands similar skills to GCSEs at levels A to C, and are increasingly recognised by employers and education institutions as a gateway to jobs and higher level study. This is largely on the back of the significant additional investment, rising from £57 million in 2001 to £151 million this year.
	We are not focusing just on basic skills, vital as they are. Support for offenders undertaking higher education has increased significantly in recent years and an increase of almost 70 per cent in library funding between 2004–05 and 2006–07 is supporting an enhanced and expanded library service in prisons. I refer to the Prisoners' Education Trust, which has a key role in managing the higher education application process and in making grants to support higher education.
	We are seeing a similar rise in achievement by offenders in the community. In 2004–05 the National Probation Service, in partnership with the Learning and Skills Council, exceeded its annual targets for basic skills starts and awards: 34,199 starts and 9,451 awards achieved against targets of 32,00 and 8,000 respectively. As well as increasing the volume and the quality of learning we have created senior heads of learning and skills posts in prisons and introduced external inspection to prisons on the same terms as for mainstream education and training providers, driving up quality.
	The noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, is right to say that many of those who go to prison have a high level of ability—misdirected in the wrong way, but with entrepreneurial skills which sometimes beggar belief in the level of their ingenuity. My noble friend Lord Filkin was also right to say that none of us can be satisfied. No matter how good these results are, they are not good enough. That is partly because there is much more for us to do, and partly because we are at a time of great opportunity, with the National Offender Management Service five-year strategy and the forthcoming offender Green Paper.
	Noble Lords who have talked about the need for us to join up are all absolutely right. Reducing re-offending involves solving multiple problems; health and education are clearly both critical. We need a joined-up approach and, through the Learning and Skills Council, are implementing new arrangements for delivering learning and skills for offenders in three development regions in England. That is supported by new and powerful alliances between key partners in the regions which support the employment, education and training strand of the regional re-offending reduction strategies.
	On 22 November, I launched three new and powerful alliances. First, there is a corporate alliance to engage with employers so that greater numbers of offenders will be able to get employment. Secondly is a civic-based alliance, encouraging those involved in the community—whether through arts, sport, local authorities or others—to come together to support the policy. Thirdly, there is a faith-based and voluntary society alliance, which will help to underpin the work that we are doing. We believe that these new alliances will make a huge difference.
	We are working together to ensure that the National Offender Management Service's five-year strategy and the proposals in the forthcoming cross-Government Green Paper tell a complementary story, focused on supporting our aim of reducing re-offending. They provide the main underpinning for the new alliances, particularly the corporate alliance aimed at encouraging employers to see offenders as prospects for jobs. So if we understand the value of a joined-up approach to reducing re-offending, how—in the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham—does that translate into action on education?
	The new learning and skills delivery arrangements are piloted through our new Learning and Skills Council, delivering an integrated service to offenders, linking it much more explicitly with mainstream provision for post-16 learners. A greater focus on skills will lead to greater employability on release, thereby making a significant contribution to reducing re-offending. The new arrangements will extend across England from August 2006.
	To answer the question from the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, an offender learning and skills service will go live in the remaining six regions on 31 July. The new service will, for the first time, explicitly bring together the education service in prisons and the vocational training activity. This joined-up service will deliver the broader curriculum that is set out in the Offender Learning Journey, a document of which there are both adult and juvenile versions.
	There is an explicit intention to smooth the transition from education in prison to continuing education in the community. Proper assessment and planning of learners' needs will obviously support that, but so will the Learning and Skills Council's planning and funding of both custodial education and education in the community. There are clear joining-up benefits in these new delivery arrangements.
	In response to the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, regarding the LSC funding shortfall, funding is passing to the Learning and Skills Council at the same levels as currently pass to the Prison Service. Getting rid of repeated assessments on transfer should mean more money is available to fund actual learning. A better planned system should enable us to be more efficient.
	The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, raised the difficulties that we must tackle as a result of historical anomalies. They cannot be overcome quickly, but we are addressing them. It would be destabilising to do it any other way. We are working toward introducing a new funding regime based on assessment of real needs, prison by prison. Funding in general for offender learning is voted by Parliament to the Department for Education—not to the Home Office—so that money, currently passed as ring-fenced to the Prison Service for education, will now pass to the LSC. No cuts are being applied on the basis of the matters outlined by the noble Lord. We have every intention of continuing to fund the arts in prison and grants will continue to organisations such as the Anne Peaker Centre for Arts and the Koestler Awards for enrichment. It is a clear requirement in the offender's learning journal and we do not expect that we will fail in that regard.
	There are significant and far-reaching changes to reform and underpinning arrangements by which education in prisons and for offenders in the community are delivered. But these changes are just, albeit important, system re-engineering. That is what we must do. Earlier this year, the Education and Skills Select Committee called for more strategic leadership and we intend to give it. Next week, the Home Office, the Department for Education and Skills and the Department for Work and Pensions will, we hope, jointly publish the Green Paper, Reducing Re-offending through skills and employment. I know that that will give the noble Baroness pleasure, as it does me. The paper will outline our ideas for future policy on offender learning, which of course will be accompanied by a thorough consultation period. I pay tribute to the work that my noble friend Lord Filkin did when he was in the department and the role that he played in the genesis of this document during his time at the Department for Education and Skills.
	The straightforward premise is that by improving offenders' skills for work we can move them out of a life of crime and into employment. We know that offenders can have unstable lives and may require support in areas other than education and work—health issues are, of course, a hugely significant factor. But I see education and work as extremely important elements of the cross-government strategy of reducing re-offending that I launched on 22 November. A number of elements to the strategy are set out in the Green Paper.
	I recognise that I have only five minutes left. Therefore I will try to be telegraphic in answering some of the issues. In relation to distance learning, I can tell the noble Lord that we accept what he said about that. The Government have increased the ICT provision within the prison estate considerably in recent years through projects such as the Prisoners' ICT Academy, which has seen new and upgraded computer workshops installed at 18 establishments. I am happy to give further details if the noble Lord wants them. The transfer of records has been an important point. The transfer of learner records is a key area of improvement. New arrangements apply in the three OLASS development regions from January and across the country from next year and will ensure that a record of an individual's skills, learning plan and achievements accompanies him or her throughout the length of their sentence and so far as possible helps the transition into mainstream programmes in the community. We anticipate providing very quickly—by 2006—exchange of data between the National Offender Management System's new offenders and management ICT system—NOMIS—and the learning management system. We understand the difficulties that offenders face in that regard.
	The noble Lord asked a number of questions in relation to detoxification and how that is managed. The criminal justice intervention programme is available in the community and has expanded the treatment opportunities prior to custody and will return to the community with a dramatic reduction in the time to get into treatment. Mental health for all prisoners is a huge issue. It is being dealt with, to answer the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas. We are undertaking an inquiry into how we address women's issues and build the reduction of re-offending programme in relation to women. We are also looking at women who have multiple needs—the sort of women in the noble Baroness highlighted in her speech who have needs relating to mental health—prolific offenders and matters of that sort.
	On hepatitis C, the rate of blood-borne viruses is higher because of the large numbers of injecting drug users in prison, which reflects the high risk activity there. Those are issues that can we continue to address.
	My noble friend Lady Gibson of Market Rasen mentioned occupational health services. The Prison Service's occupational health service is continuing to develop, with over 20 prisons having occupational health nurse advisers appointed by the service. Other prisons are engaging with the NHS occupational health service to provide that service for individual prisoners.
	I reassure my noble friend Lady Howells of St Davids that we are doing precisely what she suggests, getting directly involved in the provision of healthcare. We have been doing that for the past three years. In 1976 we introduced partnership working in prisons and, by 2003, it was a fully integrated system.
	There is so much to say in this debate, and many issues of incredible value were raised, to which I would very much like to reply fully. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, is right about dyslexia. We are looking at those issues, and I have a very good answer for him but no time to give it.
	I thank noble Lords for allowing me to say the little I have been allowed to say in my rapid 17 minutes. I will be happy to write to noble Lords on any matters still outstanding. I compliment all noble Lords who have participated and given me, at the end of a very difficult and tiring week, something to be extremely cheerful about.

Lord Hurd of Westwell: My Lords, I thank everyone, in all parts of the House, who has taken part in this debate, particularly the Minister for her reply. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Female Genital Mutilation

Baroness Rendell of Babergh: rose to ask Her Majesty's Government what is their attitude to the inclusion of female genital mutilation, carried out under duress, as a ground for asylum application.
	My Lords, UNICEF and the UN have called for asylum status to be granted to girls and young women who flee their country to escape female genital mutilation, but in practice few women have been granted asylum on these grounds.
	In a letter to the British Refugee Legal Centre, dated July 1994, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees outlined its position on female genital mutilation as follows:
	"FGM, which causes severe pain as well as permanent physical harm, amounts to a violation of human rights, including the rights of the child, and can be regarded as persecution. The toleration of these acts by the authorities, or the unwillingness of the authorities to provide protection against them, amounts to official acquiescence. Therefore a woman can be considered a refugee if she or her daughter/daughters fear being compelled to undergo FGM against their will; or, she fears persecution for refusing to undergo or allow her daughters to undergo the practice".
	One of the definitions of "torture" given in Chambers dictionary is,
	"the infliction of severe pain".
	Although persecution is not defined in the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951, the Home Office asylum policy instructions on "reasons for refusals" letters, quoting from the UNHCR's handbook, notes in its suggested standard paragraph that,
	"a threat to life or freedom on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion is always persecution".
	As a result the Home Office accepts that torture, when committed for convention reasons, would invariably constitute persecution for the purpose of the refugee convention. May I draw the Minister's attention to that "particular social group"?
	It should not be necessary, after the passing of the Female Circumcision Act 1985 and the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, to describe precisely what FGM is. Suffice it to say that this horrific mutilation involves, in all its forms, excision of the clitoris and the labia minora and, in its severest form, also of the labia majora and a stitching of tissue over the raw surface thus created. This mutilation is usually performed under unhygienic conditions, by an untrained practitioner using a knife, piece of broken glass or sharpened stone, and without anaesthetic.
	Some idea of the results of genital mutilation may be shown by the reaction of health professionals when immigrants from the Horn of Africa began arriving here in the 1970s. Nothing like their genital condition had been seen before and obstetricians, concluding that the women they saw suffered from some congenital malformation, delivered their babies by caesarean section.
	The purpose of the practice is to ensure virginity, chastity and marriageability. The age of women on whom it is performed varies from a few days' old up to marriage, and the result is death in as many as 10 per cent of cases. Its consequences are permanent pain; in some cases crippling and the breaking of bones; the total negation of any kind of sexual pleasure for the woman; and painful or dangerous complications in childbirth.
	During his time as Home Secretary, my right honourable friend David Blunkett stated that, in keeping with the 1951 refugee convention, the British Government were willing to offer asylum to women,
	"in circumstances where there is an escape from abuse, and where the state of origin itself is not providing adequate protection. We are not simply prepared to open floodgates, but are prepared to begin to look at each case openly and treat women sensitively".
	Lest there be any doubt as to the risk of mutilation being inflicted should the asylum seeker and/ or her female child or children be returned to the country of origin, it may be well to point out now that in parts of the Horn of Africa, the infliction of FGM is 90 per cent. As we have seen, this is not a surgical operation carried out at the woman's request, but inflicted upon her against her will, or reluctantly submitted to as inevitable.
	So what kind of record do other countries have on their recognition of FGM as asylum grounds? Elizabeth Salako fled Nigeria and went to Ireland, for fear of her daughter being subjected to FGM and early marriage. She received a deportation order. Pressure from the local community has resulted in a temporary stay of the order, and she has been granted another three years to remain. Only two women have ever been granted refugee status on the grounds of FGM in Ireland. The Australian Government have not recognised refugee status but have granted "asylum on humanitarian grounds." They recognised in 1996 that FGM,
	"may consititute persecution in particular circumstances".
	The French Refugee Appeal Commission has accepted that FGM may be classified as persecution and give rise to a claim for refugee status. In 1996 Fauziya Kasinga, seeking sanctuary from Togo on the grounds of FGM, was granted asylum by the United States authorities. An immigration judge's decision to return her to Togo was overturned and her claim for refugee status upheld. A year later, two families were granted asylum in Sweden on the grounds that their female members were in danger of FGM in the country of origin.
	Before this, in 1994, a significant milestone was reached in Canada. Until this point efforts to change harmful traditional practices being carried out on women were undermined by accusations of cultural imperialism. Canada was the first country to acknowledge the protection rights of women and girls threatened with FGM against their will in granting refugee status to a Somali woman, Khadra Hassan Farah, who fled her country with her 10 year-old daughter, Hodan, because she feared the little girl would be forced to undergo FGM. In making the ruling, immigration officials said that Hodan's,
	"right to personal security would be grossly infringed"
	if she returned to Somalia.
	In September 2001 a young woman from Guinea was granted refugee status by the Home Office. The 19 year-old had fled her country after being threatened with genital mutilation by her father. Her mother helped her escape by arranging for an agent to take her abroad. The argument in support of her being allowed to remain was that she was a member of a social group of young women from Muslim families who had not undergone FGM and who opposed the practice. It might be said that she belonged to two separate social groups, in that she had become a Jehovah's Witness, a sect which allows no bodily mutilation. My noble friend Lord Rooker commented in your Lordships' House that,
	"if FGM does not fit within the specific rules of the 1951 convention, and it was proved that it was taking place, we would grant exceptional leave to remain, even if refugee status were not granted".—[Official Report, 10/7/01; col. 1005.]
	Most pertinent today is the case of Zainab Esther Fornah, who appealed against a Home Office decision to send her back to Sierra Leone, her country of origin. In 2003 the Secretary of State refused her claim that she would be subjected to FGM if returned to Sierra Leone where FGM is 80 to 90 per cent. She appealed and her appeal was allowed, the adjudicator finding that the practice amounted to persecution and that she had a well-founded fear of it. He found that the fear was for a convention reason; namely, her membership of a "particular social group", which he described as one of "young Sierra Leone women" who are clearly at considerable risk.
	The Secretary of State appealed against the decision on the grounds that young Sierra Leonean women were not a particular social group within Article 1A(2) of the convention, and in August 2004 the appeal was allowed. Miss Fornah appealed again and her appeal was heard in June this year. She argued that she belonged to a particular social group of young Sierra Leonean women who had not undergone FGM. The court, by one to two—the female judge dissenting—found that not all young Sierra Leonean women feared FGM because 80 per cent had already undergone it. I believe that my noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws may have more to say on this matter when she speaks.
	Today, three of the 10 largest citizenship groups applying for asylum in the European Union come from the 28 countries of Africa where FGM is practised. Although most asylum seekers are young men, worldwide the majority of refugees are women. On entry at induction centres, asylum applicants must fill in a section on a form which states: "FGM Yes or No". This section is often left blank because describing their mutilation is offensive to many women who may come from countries where they have no vocabulary for such description.
	However, does the Minister agree that much, or most, seems to depend on the particularity of the social group and that this applies both to those who apply for asylum and to those who are empowered to grant it, the pain caused and repulsive nature of mutilation having little to do with the success of applications? Finally, does my noble friend agree that, rather than protecting against HIV, as recent rumours have it, female genital mutilation may increase the risk of transmission?

Baroness Massey of Darwen: My Lords, I am very pleased that my noble friend Lady Rendell has secured this debate and I thank her for a most informative and passionate introduction. This gives us an opportunity to highlight issues related to women's rights and health and children's rights, both of which are transgressed by FGM. I absolutely support my noble friend's conclusion that asylum should be granted for girls and women who are in danger of suffering the horrendous practice of FGM. I have a couple of questions for the Minister on the problems experienced by women in this country and on the penalties for performing FGM and attempting to have FGM performed abroad, usually on daughters or female relatives.
	I shall refer to two pieces of documentation in my discussion. One is the recent UNICEF report, Changing a Harmful Social Convention: Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting, and the book on FGM edited by Comfort Momoh, a black African midwife. The UNICEF report states:
	"FGM calls for immediate action not only in Africa but also across Europe. As a result of worldwide migration, women who have been mutilated and girls who risk becoming victims of the human rights violation currently reside in European countries as well. In Switzerland alone, one out of seven gynaecologists and midwives have been confronted with an FGM victim . . . in six cases, healthcare providers were asked to personally carry out such mutilation".
	The report calls for three major initiatives, including more information to be provided to health professionals as they lack experience in the subject, and clarification of the legal situation. Legal opinion in Switzerland has concluded that,
	"whoever performs FGM is liable to conviction for causing grievous bodily harm. This includes parents who send their daughters to their home country for the bloody ritual".
	It is still clear that some girls are mutilated because of family honour. One woman in the report said:
	"It is a norm that has to be fulfilled. The girl must be circumcised to protect her honour and the family's honour. Especially now that girls go to Universities outside the village and may be exposed to intimidating situations".
	Changing attitudes, beliefs and behaviours is of course key to changing social conventions, and six elements are identified by UNICEF as being necessary to begin changes. They are as follows. Communities need to recognise the harm caused by the practice. Men as well as women need education about FGM. Communities that intermarry or are closely related in other ways must collectively abandon the practice, which liberates them from having to make the difficult choice of breaking with tradition. Communities need to publicly affirm their collective commitment to abandoning FGM. Communities need to engage neighbouring villages so that their decision to abandoning FGM can be spread and sustained. Communities must not be forced or coerced; they need to be equipped with knowledge on human rights and recognise its application in their daily life. Communities need supportive environments, which include legislative and policy measures, support from religious leaders and other opinion leaders, and culturally sensitive messages.
	Those elements refer to life outside Britain, but it seems to me that similar changes are necessary in the UK. What information and education are available to communities to try to change attitudes? What information is available to professionals who may come across the practice, or even be asked to perform it? What are the sanctions on people who practice FGM in this country? What sanctions apply to those sending young women abroad to have it performed? How frequently are sanctions being applied? If that number is small, maybe we are missing something.
	Let me reinforce the need for action by referring to the book on FGM edited by Comfort Momoh, who has much experience of black women's health. Many issues are covered, including managing the reality of FGM in the UK, healthcare provision for pregnant asylum seekers and refugees, and FGM as an issue for child protection policies. The fact that women with FGM have specific medical, obstetric and gynaecological problems has been explored already. The book reinforces the need for information and training for professionals. Child protection policies should be clear, but there are still children who slip through the net. Therefore, strategies for FGM prevention in Europe, as described in the European Parliament Resolution on FGM, must be implemented. Such strategies are important in making policy clear and include: harmonising existing legislation across member states in Europe; opposition to any form of medicalisation; involving communities; rejecting scientific or religious bases for the practice; pursuing and punishing those carrying out the practice; and a call on the Commission to draw up a complete strategy to eliminate FGM in the European Union, enabling women at risk to obtain protection. The Commission is also asked to carry out an awareness campaign directed at legislators in the countries of origin and carry out an inquiry to ascertain the extent of FGM in member states.
	I know that the UK has specific criminal laws applying to FGM. What I am concerned about is young women being exposed to the practice without any recourse to support. I am also concerned about the lack of education and information and the potential flouting of the law. This is indeed an important issue about human rights and child protection, and I hope that we shall keep it on our consciences and on the political agenda.

The Lord Bishop of Southwell: My Lords, we are indeed most grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, for initiating this very important debate on this very important issue. I would like to make a small contribution of some background information from these Benches to indicate how seriously the Church of England and other Christian Churches both consider and deplore female genital mutilation.
	On 14 November 2002, the General Synod of the Church of England debated a Private Member's Motion on FGM at the request of an advisory group to the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. The following motion was carried at the end of that debate:
	"That this Synod, noting gratefully that all forms of female genital mutilation (FGM) are prohibited under UK law: . . . recognise the urgent need for continuing action through health education and cultural programmes to work actively towards the total eradication of these practices world wide, through the provision of alternative and harmless 'rites of passage' into adulthood, which include celebration and general approval by the local people . . . condemn all forms of FGM . . . request the Archbishops' Council to consider ways in which the dangers of FGM can be better understood by the Church and the nation . . . urge all Provinces of the Anglican Communion to challenge the ritual practices and customs which serve to legitimise FGM; and . . . welcome the efforts of the United Nations and the World Health Organisation to combat this abuse against women and girls".
	In June 2003 the International Anglican Family Network convened a consultation in Kenya on the theme of violence and the family. Thirty-two people attended the consultation representing 17 African countries. The delegates considered three aspects of violence and the family: violence between couples; violence against children; and violence from the wider world. In each case they drew on their experience and that of fellow citizens and fellow Christians in their home country to set out the nature of the problem and then made practical recommendations on tackling it. They strongly condemned the practice of female genital mutilation and most of the delegates continue to this day to tackle these issues in their local settings.
	In March 2004, when the Female Genital Mutilation Act came into force, the Church of England prepared a supporting statement to accompany the Home Office press notice, saying:
	"We support the new Act which seeks to strengthen the law and will seek to play our part in challenging the ritual practices and customs which serve to legitimise FGM".
	I reiterate that we strongly condemn the practice of FGM and agree with the Government that it is a form of persecution. However, we understand from those working with women, such as FORWARD, an organisation working with women affected by FGM, and Asylum Aid, which works with women fleeing persecution because of FGM, that women often struggle to get a fair hearing because of the difficulty of proving that their individual case fits the 1951 convention criteria of fear of persecution. In addition, A Place of Refuge, a report by the Mission and Public Affairs department of the Church of England, commissioned by General Synod, comments:
	"Procedural deficiencies can make it harder for women victims to claim asylum successfully".
	We would encourage the Government to explore ways of making sure that women fleeing their country of origin because of the fear of FGM are able to have a fair hearing.

Baroness Gould of Potternewton: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Rendell for again raising the issue of the iniquities of FGM. Like my noble friend Lady Massey, I hope that we shall continue to have such debate.
	I declare an interest as the patron of FORWARD. The debate widens our discussion on the issue by focusing on the question of girls seeking amnesty for fear of having to undergo FGM. It cannot be said too often that FGM is a fundamental violation of human rights in the absence of any perceived medical necessity. It represents an extreme form of gender discrimination and is used as a means of controlling a woman's sexuality. It can be classified as child abuse on the ground that girls under 18 cannot be said to give informed consent to such a potentially damaging practice. It is the subjugation of women, denying girls and women the full enjoyment of their rights and liberties.
	Three million girls suffer each year from the practice, breaching the many international treaties and conventions which call for an end to such harmful traditional practices. The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 was extremely welcome in amending the law to ensure that UK residents who take girls abroad for FGM can be prosecuted under UK law on their return regardless of the legal status of FGM in the country where it takes place. Despite that legislation, there is evidence that FGM is still being performed in this country and that girls are still being taken abroad. Is there any real monitoring of that situation?
	The UK legislation is in line with legislation being implemented in other countries with large immigrant populations, such as Canada, France, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA. But some of those countries, as my noble friend Lady Rendell said, have a different legal basis. For instance, Canada has legal clauses granting asylum to women and girls who fear being mutilated if they return to their country of origin. That is not the case with UK legislation.
	I appreciate that guidance is issued to asylum case workers on applications involving genital mutilation, that each case is considered in the light of the circumstances and that the immigration authorities recognise that candidates have a well founded fear of FGM. But many cases still fail. It may well be that the courts find difficulty with the current categorisation of FGM, as mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwell, and that the problem relates to the mainstreaming of gender into this categorisation, so preventing women having a fair hearing.
	While there are several instances of women and girls being granted asylum because of fear of FGM, there are also examples of asylum not being granted. For instance, my noble friend Lady Rendell referred to the case of a teenager from Sierra Leone that illustrates the uncertainties for the girls involved. The girl ran away from home because her mother wished to subject her to FGM, but she was refused asylum on the grounds that there was a sufficiency of protection in Sierra Leone for children facing FGM. That was in spite of the Home Office country assessment, which explained that the majority of women have been subjected to FGM and that the law in Sierra Leone does not prohibit the practice.
	Similarly, in the case of a girl from Kenya, the adjudicator was satisfied that she had a well founded fear of being subjected to FGM, or of being persecuted because of her refusal to undergo FGM. The Secretary of State appealed against the decision, and his appeal was allowed. While the tribunal accepted that FGM does cause serious harm, it was of the opinion that she had protection as the number of women undergoing FGM in Kenya was falling and the Government of Kenya had designed a national plan of action for the elimination of FGM. While that is true, the practice still continues, and the girl was still at risk.
	In Kenya, as in the Gambia, Tanzania and Uganda, where the practice of FGM is associated with initiation rights, action has often focused on developing alternative rites of passage, which are being well received, and which contribute to a reduction in FGM. However, these developments are limited to communities that associate FGM with such rites, so the improvement, which is welcome, is limited.
	The UNICEF document, Changing a Harmful Social Convention, which was published this year and which was referred to by my noble friend Lady Massey, suggests that as the underlying social values associated with FGM are not addressed, there is little assurance that a girl will not be cut. While there has been national legislation to prohibit FGM in 28 countries in Africa and the Middle East, only four prosecutions have so far been brought. Legislation is, of course, vital, in that it can send out a clear message of support to those who want to denounce the practice and can act as a deterrent to the practitioners, but it has to be complemented by appropriate child protection measures, comprehensive social support and information and awareness-raising campaigns. It is also essential that communities do not feel coerced or judged, and there is evidence that shows that approaches that are based on human rights have the greatest potential for promoting the abandonment of FGM.
	But change is possible, and FGM is an ever-growing reality. The view of UNICEF is that, with global support, it is conceivable that FGM can be abandoned in practising communities within a single generation. That would eliminate the need for asylum on the grounds of FGM and would enable women and girls to enjoy the human rights and freedoms identified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But there is an immediate issue, so I ask the Minister whether the categorisation issue is being considered to protect further those girls who need asylum for reasons of FGM. This would not open the floodgates for women refugees to enter this country, but would ensure a fair trial for women refugees fleeing gender persecution.
	It is important to appreciate that we are doing some things and that the support being given by the UK to the global effort is important. The right honourable Hilary Benn said that the UK Government are strongly committed to eliminating FGM within the context of achieving women's reproductive health and rights.
	I end with a declaration written by a West African Diola, a man who emigrated to America. The declaration was an opportunity for migrant members of Diola communities to affirm their rejection of FGM while reinforcing positive aspects of their culture. He said:
	"It is a wonderful day for all us Diolas living in the United States. We now can send our daughters home to the village during vacation so they can know their family and our positive Diola traditions without worrying that they will undergo this cutting practice".
	I think that belief should apply across the world so that all girls will feel protected and safe when they go back to their homes, and that they will have a future in which they can develop emotionally and without fear.

Baroness Cox: My Lords, I also warmly congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, on introducing this debate on a matter of such great concern to all of us. The noble Lord, Lord Rea, and I are having a trip down memory lane, because we spoke on this subject more than 20 years ago, supporting the legislation prohibiting female circumcision in this country. It is so sad that we still have to be addressing the subject tonight.
	My contribution is based on my clinical experiences working as a nurse in Africa where this disturbing procedure is widely practised. I have seen at first hand the associated physical trauma and psychological harm. Having seen that, I emphasise that I believe that all that is associated with this practice does indeed merit the most sympathetic consideration as a ground for an asylum application.
	As has been said, the term FGM may include a range of procedures involving varying degrees of mutilation. The least traumatic is termed "Sunna"; the most radical is infibulation. All the evidence suggests that there are no physical benefits whatever to be gained from any form of such practices—rather the reverse. There are numerous attendant risks to all forms of FGM.
	I shall briefly highlight some of the health risks having seen them at first hand. The immediate and short-term physical complications include haemorrhage, pain, shock, localised infection, septicaemia, difficulties with micturition and damage to adjacent tissues and organs. Longer-term physical complications include the danger of chronic infection, development of abscesses, scar tissue, cysts and neuromas, dysmenorrhoea, dyspareunia and obstetric complications. Many other secondary and long-term complications may also follow; for example, renal disease resulting from urinary tract infection.
	In addition to such physical ill-effects, psychological and especially psycho-sexual problems may result. The research evidence is less substantial here, partly because many of the women involved are reluctant to speak out on the subject, and partly because many are naturally influenced by the norms and values of their culture, which may advocate such procedures as desirable. However, the physical mutilation resulting from FGM in even its mildest form must be expected to have some adverse psycho-sexual effects. There are many accounts of women who have undergone infibulation who experience terror at the prospect of marriage and acute pain in the process of deinfibulation.
	As we have heard, FGM is widely practised in many countries in Africa, but it is also found in other parts of the world, such as Oman, South Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, and among the Muslim populations of Indonesia and Malaysia. While it is impossible to estimate precisely the numbers of women involved, well-informed sources claim that the order of magnitude is still at the level of tens of millions, and a small number, as we have heard this evening from a number of noble Lords, are still being reported in Europe. That is a matter of very great concern.
	Clearly, a practice that is so widespread must have powerful social and cultural legitimation and be supported by many members of the communities involved. The reasons for the continuation of this practice include beliefs that circumcision is desirable because it is hygienic, prevents promiscuity, enhances the desirability and value of women, is in keeping with age-old tradition and symbolises a girl's transition to adulthood. It is perhaps relevant to point out that many of these beliefs are inconsistent in so far as they bear no relation to empirical reality. For example, there is no correlation between female circumcision—or FGM—and hygiene—rather the reverse, as it is often associated with chronic infection. With regard to the argument of the traditional association with the rite de passage into adulthood, that too is inaccurate. As we have heard, FGM is frequently performed on infants or girls who are so young that they cannot be seen as nearing adolescence.
	Given these anomalies, it is important to seek other reasons for the perpetuation of this custom. These may include the financial incentives for those who perform the operations, the influence of older women who have themselves been subjected to this procedure, the power of community pressure, and a suspicion, which has already been mentioned, that Westerners are perhaps trying to eliminate or influence traditional cultures.
	An early UNICEF report, Position on Female Circumcision, published in May 1979, concluded:
	"The abolition of a widespread and deeply entrenched custom of such long standing, fraught as it is with cultural sensitivities, cannot of course be accomplished overnight. What should be emphasised is that the task is being undertaken carefully, but actively, on several fronts and that UNICEF is seriously committed to the effort to overcome the practice of female circumcision".
	That was May 1979. As we have heard, there is still a long way to go.
	I conclude with two personal recollections which still cause me acute dismay whenever I recall them. Perhaps they will highlight for your Lordships the stark realities of this practice in other countries where it is still commonplace. First, I remember being present in a maternal and child healthcare clinic in Wad Medani, Sudan, when a young mother who had been subjected to infibulation was admitted for the birth of her first child. There was no way in which any progress with normal delivery could proceed, given the very small aperture resulting from FGM. If she had not been able to attend a clinic with opportunities for an episiotomy, she would never have been able to deliver that baby and both would have died—her own death would have been agonising. Alternatively, had she been in a remote area, someone might have undertaken a crude episiotomy-type of procedure—performed, for example, by a local so-called midwife—which would probably have been undertaken with a crude knife, unsterile scissors or even a sharp stone. The risks of tetanus or post-natal infection would have been very high and her post-natal reinstatement of infibulation would have been highly traumatic and likely to leave permanent scarring, even more dysfunctional than before.
	By contrast, in the clinic, the episiotomy was performed successfully and hygienically. After delivery, the mother was asked if she would prefer the suturing to be less radical, thus allowing slightly more normal functions. She replied, frightened, that she would not dare to see her husband again unless she returned in the same condition as she came to the clinic. Therefore, she left the clinic with the same severely dysfunctional infibulation, inevitably prone to pain, infection and numerous complications.
	My other memory takes me back to a remote desert location in northern Sudan, in northern Kordofan, where I was helping to establish an immunisation programme for populations who had no provision for immunisation against six killer diseases. The philosophy of the organisation with which I was working—Fellowship for African Relief—required us to live alongside the local people, in the same conditions as them, not to establish a separate Western comfort-zone bubble. So we had the privilege of living in the midst of the community alongside our neighbours. I will never forget the nights when local women took young girls away for the so-called ceremony of infibulation and the screams of agony and the pain of those young girls for days afterwards. The suffering of the radical excision was exacerbated when the community had no sutures, but used thorns as an alternative to stitches.
	I hope these examples of the realities of FGM are relevant to the subject of this debate. Having witnessed at close quarters the horrors of the procedure and the long-term physical and psychological trauma associated with it, I can only add my strongest possible support to sympathetic consideration of the risk of being subjected to FGM as meriting maximum sympathy as grounds for asylum. I hope that we will have reassurances from the Minister this evening to that effect.

Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: My Lords, others have spoken about the horror and suffering involved in this terrible practice. We should remember that 3 million women undergo FGM every year. I pay tribute to the Government for legislating in 2003 and passing the Female Genital Mutilation Act, in which we extended the law to make it an offence for any UK citizen to perform this operation anywhere in the world or to take any girl to anywhere in the world to have it performed. I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, who has been a great champion of this issue, for initiating this debate. I shall never forget that she and I made a visit to the African women's clinic in North Middlesex Hospital where we saw slides of what had been done to women's genitalia. I remember talking with doctors who saw so many young women with serious menstrual difficulties, who are unable to enjoy love-making, who had serious infections and had problems giving birth because of what had been done to them.
	The major problem for women remains that when human rights law and the refugee convention were drafted in the post-Second World War period, in 1951, there was little understanding or acknowledgment of the special ways in which women were persecuted. Persecution was deemed to be cruelty and suffering meted out to people on the grounds of race, political opinion, religion or if they belonged to a particular social group. As a result, women have always had difficulty claiming rights deriving from the convention because governments have hidden behind the narrow definitions to avoid their responsibility for crimes against women. Nations should be coming together to say that persecution on the grounds of gender is as egregious as any other kind of persecution. But there is an avoidance of doing that because to revisit the refugee convention at this particular time may provide an opportunity to many governments to reduce standards and the kind of sanctuary that asylum should provide.
	Slowly, courts in a few advanced democracies have used the particular social group provision to protect women. Canada has gone further and through domestic legislation extended the definitions of the international conventions to gender in so far as they apply to Canada. In this country, human rights activists and lawyers felt that there had been a great breakthrough in the case of Shah and Islam, which went to the House of Lords. The court accepted in that case that if widows were at risk of widow-burning if they were returned to their communities in the Indian subcontinent, they should be granted asylum. However, in the recent Court of Appeal case to which others have referred, Fornah v the Secretary of State for the Home Department, we saw a return to a technocratic application of the law. In my view it was an appalling decision on a young Sierra Leonean girl being refused sanctuary. The judges had the opportunity to strike the right note again, but instead they took their own sanctuary in a mean and narrow interpretation of the law in relation to particular social groups. Although they made all the right noises about how awful FGM is, they then pointed out that it only happened to a woman once, that women performed it on other women—so it was not male violence to women—and that, in Sierra Leone, the vast majority of women happily consented to having it done. They also relied on the argument that if you are defined by your persecution, you are not a member of a social group, as required by the convention: technocratic justifications if ever we had them.
	Human rights are always at risk of arguments about cultural relativism. By that I mean that this is a traditional practice in certain societies, that it is accepted by the victims, and that therefore it is wrong for us in the West to decry them. If human rights are to mean anything, these arguments have to be rejected. It is particularly interesting that the one dissenting judgment in the case of Fornah was the lone female voice of Lady Justice Arden. She did not agree with her male colleagues. It is also interesting that in the case of Hoxha, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale—our lone female judge in the House of Lords—made a plea for recognition of gender persecution. This was a case which related to Kosovan women who were raped during the war in the Balkans. Not only was rape used as a means of punishing female Kosovans, but as a result of being raped, women in very traditional communities could never receive acceptance again. The stigma rendered them outcasts.
	The point is that female genital mutilation is done to women only by virtue of their being women. Being a woman is what draws down this cruelty, and if a woman refuses to have it done, she is either made to submit to it by force or she is deemed to be an outcast, unmarriageable and rejected by her family. If anything, that recent case argues for more women judges in our courts. It is cases like these which highlight the problems of gender issues still continuing in our courtrooms because the men involved do not realise that their own mindset is often what determines their approach to the law. I must be clear that some judges do not fall into this category. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Steyn, and others in the House of Lords in the case of Shah were examples of a very different attitude.
	I also want to support the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, in her plea to the Home Office. The Home Office cannot hide behind the failures of the judiciary here. It was the Home Office that refused asylum and took these cases to appeal. The reason for its stance in opposing the granting of asylum is its fear that many more women will apply under this heading. But the only way that clear messages can be sent around the world that this practice is unacceptable is by acknowledging that it is persecution for asylum purposes.
	I urge the Minister to take back with him to his department the idea that we too consider legislating as Canada has done to extend persecution categories to gender so that women or men who suffer by virtue of their gender should be included in the list of those who might suffer. I also ask the Home Office to accept that girls and women sometimes fail to mention their fears of female genital mutilation at an early stage in applying for asylum because of the intimate nature of this persecution and their social inhibitions about giving voice to these practices. I also urge the Minister to tell us whether there has been monitoring and whether there have been any prosecutions of people taking their children back to countries in Africa and elsewhere to have this practice done. The fear among many women's groups is that the practice is going unprosecuted.
	This is a timely debate. I hope that the House of Lords Judicial Committee will reverse the decision that was made in the Court of Appeal. I also urge the Home Office to review its own policy.

Lord Rea: My Lords, my noble friend Lady Rendell, apart from her very effective opening speech, has also been a very effective recruiting sergeant for her Unstarred Question, as we have heard from the quality of the speeches so far. My orders—and I will happily obey them as much as I can—were to provide an account of the serious health problems, both physical and psychological, that this traumatic procedure can set in train. As I think every speaker has mentioned so far, this affects girls and women of child-bearing age when they willingly or unwillingly return to a country such as the Sudan, Eritrea or Somalia, and a band of countries across the Sahel climatic zone of Africa where the practice is widespread. It is also practised in some other countries, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, described, and there is still a danger in those countries that women may possibly be coerced or cajoled by social or family pressure into submitting to the procedure.
	I first became involved with the FGM world shortly after I joined your Lordships' House 23 years ago in 1983, when Lord Kennet asked me to describe from a medical point of view—in, I think, my second speech in the House—what the procedure was and the problems it caused, in support of his Prohibition of Female Circumcision Bill. That Bill did not reach the statute book, but a very similar one, piloted through your Lordships' House by the noble Baroness, Lady Masham of Ilton, did become an Act in 1985. As others have pointed out, that has subsequently been amended to make illegal the taking of girls or young women from this country to another for the procedure to be done. I also served on a panel set up by the All-Party Population Development and Reproductive Health Group to hold hearings into the whole problem of FGM in 2000.
	I do not think it necessary to go into the minute clinical details of the four types of FGM mentioned by my noble and professional friend, Lady Cox. I did this in 1983, and she has done it again tonight. The words are in Hansard, and much fuller descriptions are available elsewhere. Mr Harry Gordon, a gynaecologist at the Central Middlesex Hospital, famous for his skill in repairing the damage done to the genitalia of women who have undergone FGM, has contributed a chapter in Comfort Momoh's comprehensive book which has already been mentioned by a number of other speakers. The website of FORWARD, the FGM campaigning organisation, gives shorter, simpler, descriptions.
	In some countries, especially the Sudan, where the most drastic form of FGM occurs—the pharaonic method, where the labia majora are abraded and stitched together, leaving only a tiny opening—the practice even extends to educated, westernised women. Harry Gordon told me of a Sudanese woman, the wife of a diplomat, who came to him to have her infibulation corrected—which he did successfully—who then returned to the Sudan a few years later with her husband. At home, she was subjected to such social pressure that she felt she had to undergo infibulation again, even though she came from a class which, in other countries where the practice is common, has rejected the procedure.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Cox, has already described the complications and the health consequences of this operation quite well, so I will not go down that. However, there are one or two things that I should perhaps emphasise. One is that the condition has a high mortality rate in the areas where it is carried out under unhygienic conditions. Some estimates have been as high as 10 per cent. A further complication not often mentioned may arise from damage to the external opening of the urethra. This may lead to urinary infection and, more seriously, to a stricture which causes back pressure on the bladder and kidneys, leading eventually to renal failure. Harry Gordon told me of just such a case where the woman came to him in a very bad way and has now had to go on to dialysis and is waiting for a kidney transplant.
	I therefore strongly support my noble friend's plea for asylum status or permission to stay to be granted to vulnerable women and children who are nationals of countries where the practice is carried out. By expelling such women, the Government could theoretically be accused of infringing our own law, which makes it an offence to take girls abroad to undergo FGM.
	Relevant to this question is The Asylum (Designated States) (No. 2) Order 2005 which went through this House two weeks ago. I would like to remind my noble friend on the Front Bench, Lord Bassam, of what he said at the time in answer to questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, who may indeed raise this herself. He said:
	"With regard to perhaps the more important question the noble Baroness asked, whether we would return women to face female genital mutilation or other serious human rights abuses: of course we would not. It is for that reason, because of our concerns, that we have drafted the order in the way that we have for Ghana and Nigeria. If we considered that there was a genuine active risk that a young girl or a woman would experience female genital mutilation or other serious human rights abuses, we would not return them to that country".—[Official Report, 24/11/05; col. 1809.]
	It seems that the Government, in my noble friend's answer, moved quite close to agreeing to the points made by my noble friend Lady Rendell and others who have spoken.

Lord Dholakia: My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell of Babergh, for the debate. She has campaigned tirelessly on the subject and deserves the support of all those who care about the rights and freedoms of individuals affected by this vile practice. The subject inspires revulsion because it is all to do with mutilating a woman's body. It goes against the instinct of all our civilised values, and we should condemn such practices without hesitation.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Gould of Potternewton, mentioned the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003. It is worth repeating that, for the first time, it made it an offence for a UK national to aid, abet, counsel or procure the carrying out of such procedures abroad as well as in the United Kingdom. In human rights, which the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, mentioned, there can be no compromise on harmful practices. I know of no religion that prescribes mutilation. The practice, prevalent in some countries, inflicts mutilation on girls aged from about four to 12 years. UNICEF describes it as one of the worst violations of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We rightly condemn such practices because they are unacceptable on scientific, moral and religious grounds.
	We must always be vigilant to ensure that those chosen to be part of a multi-racial society are aware of the law designed to protect victims. Equally, we must ensure that those who seek shelter because of such practices will be protected at all costs. We should use the full force of the law against perpetrators of such deeds in the misguided belief that it protects virginity, ensures marriageability and contains sexuality. It does nothing of the sort.
	All those who work with children, in a voluntary or statutory capacity, are interested in achieving lasting benefits for children in the communities in which they live. We all want to make children's rights a reality. It cannot be disputed that FGM causes unnecessary suffering to girls. It is a harmful practice, and rightly we condemn it.
	The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwell mentioned the 1951 refugee convention. We also support the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly Article 2, on the right to equality irrespective of sex; Article 19.1, on freedom from all forms of mental and physical violence or maltreatment; Article 24.1, on the right to the highest standards of health; Article 24.3, on taking effective and appropriate measures to abolish traditional practices prejudicial to the health of children; and Article 37(a), on freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
	As mentioned, Canada and the United States have led the way in establishing precedents, in 1994 and 1996 respectively, to offer asylum to those threatened with FGM. Sending a young woman back to forcibly undergo such a practice would infringe her human rights. We must offer refuge to young women and girls genuinely threatened with such torture.
	Questions need to be asked about what progress has been made in eradicating the practice in the United Kingdom. I do not expect the Minister to deal with those questions at this late hour, but I hope that, when he has a minute, he can reply to me in writing. First, how many criminal prosecutions have been carried out against the perpetrators of such practices? I have found no evidence of any cases reaching our courts. Why not? Surely the law is an unequivocal statement of our public policy on that matter. A single convicted case in the court could set a benchmark on the matter. It is seriously worrying that the conviction rate for rape is now down to 5.3 per cent, yet we do not even have that proportion of convictions for carrying out FGM.
	Will the new Children's Commissioner undertake to address the problem? Likewise, what guidance is the Minister for Children giving in respect of this issue? What specific guidance is given to social workers regarding registration and action in respect of this practice? What common code of conduct is there for all healthcare professionals regarding FGM? What programme of public education is undertaken for refugees who arrive here from certain countries where such practices are prevalent? Do we publish information in other languages, so that refugees and others are aware of the law in the United Kingdom? What training and guidance are provided to teachers and students to make them aware of FGM issues and the law? What financial and other support is available for women's groups and advocacy groups? Such groups are vital as catalysts in opening discussions and breaking the taboo surrounding FGM.
	Legislation alone is not enough. It can be effective when a system of child monitoring and protection is in operation, when there is widespread education of communities and motivation of public opinion against the practice and when women and the communities are involved in efforts to abolish the practice. We should compromise for nothing less and ensure that women receive our full protection, including a right of refuge here.

Baroness Seccombe: My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, for providing us with yet another opportunity to debate this question. No one who has heard what has been said in the House today or previously can doubt the importance of the subject. It inflicts enormous suffering and lifelong medical and psychological problems on some of the most vulnerable members of our society. Despite that, or indeed possibly because of it, it is one of the most taboo subjects throughout the world today, considered too culturally sensitive to be given the attention that it deserves. That situation must change. No cultural tradition is so precious that widespread child abuse can be justified in its name. The embarrassed silence that surrounds the topic must be broken, both among the public services that deal with the terrible effects of female genital mutilation and in the communities practising it.
	In this House and another place, there have been several very useful debates on the 2003 Act. They frequently concentrated, as is only sensible, on ensuring that the legislation covered people who needed protection and did not allow any loopholes, while not criminalising medical practitioners for operations unrelated to FGM. As important as those debates were, it is clear that the terrible practice of female genital mutilation has not been wiped out by those measures. Just a month ago on 10 November, the Birmingham Evening Mail drew attention to the abuse of girls at several of the local schools. Volunteer bodies still report the practice as well established among communities in other cities, and health clinics are still seeing patients suffering from long-term and short-term effects.
	Added to that, the practice is barely recognised in the mainstream media as an issue. If it is mentioned at all, it is seen as a problem for far-off countries and communities rather than one affecting British citizens in cities and towns throughout the country. Ignorance about FGM is everywhere. Very few know the number of girls and women who are affected, and very few know about the severity of the procedure and its consequences or about the impossibility that many girls at risk have of escaping mutilation by their own unaided efforts. The authorities at every level, national and local, must do more to work with all people involved to ensure a network of understanding and support.
	The subject of increased education and awareness is not new. In 2000, the All-Party Parliamentary Group reported that only 46 per cent of local health and education authorities, social services departments and refugee councils were aware of legislation on the subject. Yet, in Birmingham, it is only now that cross-agency groups are being set up. Why is it that professionals working with north African communities are still untrained, after 20 years, in recognising and dealing with this illegal practice? That is doubly true in the matter of ensuring that health professionals are also fully aware of the issues. Women who have undergone FGM are twice as likely to die in childbirth and four times as likely to have a stillborn child. When health workers are not familiar with FGM, not only do complications and suffering become even more dangerous, but victims run the risk of suffering humiliating inquiries or even of being denied treatment.
	Community-focused awareness groups have also failed to be as effective as they should because of the widespread view that this is a women's issue. True, it is done to and often by women, but ignoring the part that male-dominated societies play in perpetuating the custom means that we are ignoring fundamental realities about the communities at risk. As long as young men continue to believe that no girl is suitable to be a wife without having undergone the process or fathers believe that they are protecting their daughter's honour by insisting that it be carried out, there will be no real changes. Similarly, older women in the community, often ignored by education groups seeking to reach the more modern women, wield enormous influence over community life and customs.
	In spite of the numerous debates in this House and another place in the 20 years that the practice has been illegal, there has not, I understand, been a single prosecution. That no one has been held to account for the perpetuation of this crime, despite the estimated 74,000 women in the UK who have undergone the process, is a failure on our part as a society and as parliamentarians to ensure that legislation is properly implemented and carried through. In June, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Office, Fiona Mactaggart, explained the lack of prosecutions by describing the lack of reporting. The crimes were simply not coming to the attention of the police or other bodies such as the social services. It is therefore clear that the priority now must be widespread education and awareness, throughout the country, to combat age-old prejudices and misinformation about this terrible custom.
	It is horrifying that in this day and age children are still being abused in this way. So, I end by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, on her dogged determination to eliminate such illegal, cruel and barbaric procedures. I also thank her for all that she is doing to ensure not only that the law is upheld but that children are shielded from this vile and appalling practice.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, for her work in putting the issue of female genital mutilation very much into our political debates and for ending, as the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, said, the embarrassed silence and taboo that has lingered around the debate during the 20 years that this practice has been illegal. I also welcome the opportunity of explaining how the Immigration and Nationality Directorate deals with asylum claims involving the issue of female genital mutilation.
	I cannot speak as eloquently as noble Baronesses and noble Lords have done in this debate and I readily admit that on this subject my knowledge is not as great as theirs. I feel truly humbled by the contributions made in the discussion and am greatly impressed by the knowledge, experience and passion of all contributors. There is common agreement that female genital mutilation is a collective term for procedures that include the removal of part or all of the external female genitalia for cultural or other non-theraputic reasons. The practice is medically unnecessary and extremely painful. It has serious health and mental health consequences, both at the time when the mutilation is conducted and in later life.
	Amnesty International estimates that some 135 million women have suffered from female genital mutilation. As the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, said, the procedure is typically performed on girls. They are usually between the ages of four and 13 but, in some cases, it takes place with new-born infants or on young women prior to marriage or pregnancy. As the noble Lord, Lord Rea, said, a number of women die as a direct result of the procedure, from blood loss or infection.
	Female genital mutilation is much more common than people realise. We should take the Amnesty International statistics at face value, but even they are likely to be an underestimate, given that it is practised in at least 28 African countries and in parts of the Middle and Far East. Worryingly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, said, it also occurs increasingly in western Europe and other developed countries, primarily among immigrant and refugee communities.
	This inhumane practice has been a specific criminal offence in the United Kingdom since 1985 when the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act was passed. The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 replaced the 1985 Act. The 2003 Act for the first time made it illegal for British nationals or permanent residents to carry out, or to aid, abet, counsel or procure the carrying out of, female genital mutilation abroad, even in countries where the practice is lawful. The practice of female genital mutilation clearly has no place in a civilised society. It is therefore understandable that some women or girls who do not wish to be subjected to it should seek refuge in the United Kingdom.
	Asylum claims where female genital mutilation is raised are, like all others, carefully considered on their individual merits by caseworkers in the Home Office's Immigration and Nationality Directorate. Caseworkers assess each claim under the terms of the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Under the terms of that convention, a refugee is a person who,
	"owing to a well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his [or her] nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country".
	Unsurprisingly, the Government readily accept that female genital mutilation is a practice serious enough to constitute persecution. Where there is a reasonable likelihood that the applicant will be subjected to female genital mutilation for one of the grounds set out in the convention—race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion—she will be granted asylum. The noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, made particular reference to the significance of being a member of a particular social group. That plays a very important part in these considerations.
	In theory, FGM could occur for any one of the reasons set out in the convention. However, generally caseworkers see very few applicants who fear being subjected to FGM because of their religious or political beliefs or for reasons of their nationality or race. In reality, most claims involving female genital mutilation will be based on the applicant's alleged membership of a particular social group.
	Case law has established that women are most likely to be recognised as members of a particular social group if they come from countries where they face widespread societal discrimination. This could occur in societies where traditional, patriarchal or cultural attitudes towards women create a general perception that women have fewer rights than men. This, in turn, may lead to reluctance on behalf of the state authorities to protect women from harm or to interfere in what are termed family matters.
	I am aware that not all applicants who are at risk of female genital mutilation are able to show that their fear of being subjected to the practice is for a convention reason. In these cases, caseworkers cannot grant asylum under the terms of the Refugee Convention, but they can grant leave to remain in accordance with our policies on humanitarian protection.
	Broadly speaking, humanitarian protection is granted to applicants who do not fit the criteria of the Refugee Convention, but who can demonstrate that they would be at real risk of torture, inhumane or degrading treatment if returned to their home country. Such treatment would breach their rights under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. As FGM is contrary to Article 3, anyone who faces a real risk of FGM but does not qualify for asylum will be eligible for a grant of humanitarian protection.
	We have recently brought our policies on humanitarian protection closely into line with those on refugees. Like refugees, asylum seekers who are granted humanitarian protection are now given five years' leave in the first instance and they have an immediate right to family reunion. This reflects the Government's belief that people granted humanitarian protection deserve a similar level of protection to refugees while they are here. Members of the Government are frequently asked why some women who fear they will be subjected to FGM are granted neither refugee status nor humanitarian protection. I want to address these concerns.
	Future risk to the applicant is the most decisive factor in assessing any asylum claim. Applicants who say that they will be subjected to FGM in the future must show that their fear of persecution is well founded. Whether or not an asylum application is well founded will depend on a range of factors. For example, applicants from countries where the authorities are known to show a willingness, and have the ability, to protect women from harm, are less likely to qualify for asylum than those who come from countries where the practice of FGM is rife and the authorities refuse to do anything about it.
	Similarly, unless it would be "unduly harsh" to require the applicant to relocate to another part of her own country to avoid being subjected to FGM, the asylum claim is unlikely to succeed. We recognise that it will not always be possible, notably for cultural or social reasons, for a young woman to leave home to lead an independent life. There may be cases, however, where an applicant is able to establish herself in another town or city, away from the threat of persecution.
	This illustrates not only how important it is for caseworkers to assess each claim on its individual merits, but also how crucial it is that country information on which asylum decisions are based is objective, accurate and as up to date as possible.
	The Government have recently taken a number of steps to improve the quality of country information. The independent advisory panel on country information was established under the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 to consider, and make recommendations to the Home Office about, the content of its country of origin information. Members of the advisory panel include individuals and organisations operating in the country information and refugee fields. We have seen significant improvements in the content and, I would argue, the objectivity of information since the establishment of the panel.

Lord Dholakia: My Lords, perhaps the Minister could arrange for this information to be placed in the Library, so that we can see accurately what is happening in some of these countries?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I think I have explained to the noble Lord before that there is a regularly updated website with this information on. I am more than happy to see what we can do to ensure that it is available not just online but is placed in paper form in the Library of the House.
	On issuing guidance for caseworkers on assessing asylum claims involving gender-related persecution, we published an asylum policy instruction in March 2004. That makes it clear that asylum seekers who are at risk of FGM or other forms of gender-related violence—such as rape, domestic violence and forced abortion—may qualify for asylum if they can show that the mistreatment is likely to occur for one of the reasons set out in the 1951 refugee convention.
	The policy instruction goes further than merely reminding caseworkers to interpret the refugee convention properly, however. It also aims to ensure that the UK asylum process is as accessible and sensitive to the needs of women as it possibly can be.
	The asylum policy instruction recognises that women who have suffered trauma may have difficulty in coming to terms with their experiences. In particular, applicants who have suffered sexual abuse and/or fear future mistreatment may not feel comfortable explaining their concerns in front of interviewing officers or interpreters of the opposite sex. The policy instruction states that the Immigration and Nationality Directorate will make every effort to comply with a request for an interviewer or an interpreter of the same sex as the applicant which is made in advance of the asylum interview.
	The policy instruction also instructs caseworkers to try to avoid interviewing women in front of children or male relatives, who may not be aware of all the reasons their mother or wife is claiming asylum. Wherever possible, caseworkers will interview applicants by themselves, particularly in cases where a claim of sexual abuse has been made or it is considered to be a genuine possibility. The Government aim to ensure that all female claimants are given every opportunity to explain their reasons for asylum.
	I hope this helps to clarify the Government's policy on asylum and reassures the House that the Government will not return anybody to a situation where they will face a real risk of being subjected to FGM or any other form of persecution.
	Many questions were asked during the debate. I have answered some of those points, and I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, who gave me advance warning of their intention to ask particular questions. The major issue to emerge from this debate is the lack of prosecutions. That is the case; we do not have a record of there being any prosecutions following the 2003 Act. We are not alone in that; other countries which have specific laws against FGM suffer from a similar problem. The reasons for the lack of prosecutions are not entirely clear, but the contributors to the debate explained them as best they could.
	The Act gives effect to recommendations made earlier by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Population Development and Reproductive Health, which in 2000 held hearings and carried out a survey about FGM, exploring the work of organisations in the UK and overseas. Its report explored the reasons for the lack of prosecutions and cites that among those were a lack of awareness of the legislation; pressure from family and the wider community to remain silent; and the enforcement organisations' fear of being labelled racist or insensitive to other cultures. Clearly, there is a challenge here. Victims, being young and vulnerable, are frequently afraid to report offences, despite the crime being so appalling.
	It may also be the case that some offences are being reported but there is insufficient evidence to mount a prosecution. This is likely to be closely linked to the willingness of victims and others to come forward and give evidence in court. Before a prosecution can be brought, a complaint must be made to the police and a full investigation carried out. We have been active in considering ways of giving further advice to investigating officers in this area and, clearly, there is much work to be done there. To our knowledge, two doctors have been struck off the medical register in the past 12 years for undertaking FGM, although it is not known why there was no prosecution. One case goes back some dozen or so years. Another doctor was struck off for offering to perform the operation as recently as 2000.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, commented on the need to raise awareness. That is linked to the issue of prosecutions. In the interval between the Act receiving Royal Assent in October 2003 and being introduced in March 2004 we worked very closely with colleagues in the Department of Health and the Department for Education and Skills to ensure that relevant professionals were informed about the legislation. The Home Office issued a circular to police forces and others in the criminal justice system. The Department of Health placed articles in the Chief Medical Officer's update, which is dispatched to every doctor in the country, covers all disciplines and is an excellent vehicle for getting messages across, and the Chief Nursing Officer's bulletin which reaches, among others, all midwives. That is probably the most important group of health professionals to target. The Department for Education and Skills issued guidance to social services. So we have been active in putting information in the right places for law enforcement, health and education professionals.
	The noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, asked a more general question about the level of support we provide to those voluntary organisations that work with practising communities to eradicate FGM, namely FORWARD, with which the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, and others have a close association, and the Black Women's Health and Family Support organisation. We have had discussions with them about how best to raise awareness of the new law among practising communities. As a result of those discussions, the Home Office has given financial support to the ACCM and Black Women's Health and Family Support. One-off funding was provided over and above the government funding already given to FORWARD.
	According to feedback from the ACCM, the community events that it has arranged have been well attended. Some younger women speaking out against the practice have come forward, and there has been a significant increase in interest and concern among those communities.
	I was invited by my noble friend Lady Massey to set out the penalties that exist under the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003. The maximum sentence that can be imposed for an offence under the Act is 14 years' imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine. The previous maximum sentence was five years' imprisonment. That is testament to the seriousness that we place on this appalling crime.
	I have spoken for some time and would like to deal with some of the other issues in correspondence. I am more than happy to supply copies of that correspondence to all those who have taken part in the debate, which has been extremely important. I hope that I have managed to indicate not just the seriousness with which we view this appalling crime against women but how we are trying to make active use of the criminal justice system and how we are trying to work with health professionals in this country to raise awareness of the issue.
	I am extremely grateful to my noble friend Lady Rendell for her very powerful contribution to the debate and to all noble Lords who have participated in it. Returning to the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, one of the most important things that we can do is to end the silence and ensure that people are well advised and that they understand the significance and importance of this matter. Together—not just in this country but internationally—we must work to outlaw this appalling practice.

House adjourned at eight minutes before seven o'clock.
	Thursday, 8 December 2005.